One sticky morning last summer, Sara Blakely, the inventor of Spanx, which over the past decade has become to women’s foundation garments what Scotch is to cellophane tape, was sitting in the Park Avenue offices of her husband, Jesse Itzler, confronting a new challenge: the male anatomy. Red boxes of stretchy Spanx undershirts for men were strewn across a table before the couple. “Sara sent my dad, who is going to be eighty-two years old, a tank top,” Itzler said.
Blakely smiled. “He said it took him half a day to get into it, and half a day to get out,” she said. “My mom said she’d never laughed harder,” Itzler added.
There was also a prototype of black cotton briefs with a sturdy “3D” pouch over the groin, devised by Spanx’s product-development team after several male testers complained to Blakely that they needed more support. “They were, like, ‘It just kind of hangs,’ ” she said.
“And is the hole big enough? To get through?” Blakely went on, fingering the pouch. “It seems like you’d have to really . . . bring it out. Look, I’m in foreign territory here.”
“Yes, yes,” Itzler said, rolling his eyes.
Blakely, who recently turned forty and is a size 6 (“the largest I’ve ever been,” she said), with long blond hair and bright-white teeth, believes that there is no figure problem—saddlebags, upper-arm jiggle, stomach rolls—that can’t be solved with a little judiciously placed Lycra. “Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’ ” Blakely said. “I’ll ask my brother, ‘If you could wave your wand and make your boxer shorts better, what would you do?” Her first big idea, in 1998, was to chop the feet off a pair of control-top panty hose so that she could get a svelte, seamless look under white slacks without stockings poking out of her sandals. The resulting product, Footless Pantyhose, has sold nine million pairs since October of 2000, when Blakely, who was then a fax-machine saleswoman and a part-time standup comic, started Spanx, with five thousand dollars of savings. Another Spanx product, a lightweight girdle called Power Panties that retails for around thirty dollars, has sold six million units since it was introduced, in 2002. (...)
Spanx’s popularity repudiates the late-twentieth-century belief, perpetuated by Jane Fonda and Nike, that a firm body can be achieved only through sweaty resolve. “There’s a whole subset of women who don’t relate to that idea,” Blakely said. She is overseeing a new line of activewear, called In It to Slim It, but there is a desultory feel to the enterprise. “I started thinking about joy,” Blakely said. “Everything in our society is so purposeful. Let’s bring joy back to the experience—have fun when you’re doing it,” meaning exercise. She has already expanded into legwear (Tight-End Tights); lacy lingerie (Haute Contour); casual separates (Bod a Bing!); and retro, ruffled swimwear. Spanx now offers more than two hundred different products, and executives at the company, which is privately held, and reported three hundred and fifty million dollars in global retail sales in 2008, worry that customers are having trouble distinguishing among them. Part of the line is manufactured by Acme-McCrary, a century-old firm in the hosiery mecca of Asheboro, North Carolina (the rest is outsourced to other countries). Larry Small, who until recently was Acme-McCrary’s C.E.O., told me that Spanx represents close to a third of his business, and he called Blakely a “rock star” in an industry of good ol’ boys. “I’ve always wondered how the heck men are supposed to sell hosiery,” he said.
Blakely chose the brand’s name partly for what she calls its “virgin-whore tension,” and partly for its “k” sound, which has a good track record in both business and comedy. “I used to hold my breath every time I said it out loud,” she told me. “People were so offended they’d hang up on me.” When the Spanx Web site first went live, Blakely’s mother accidentally directed a tableful of luncheon guests to spanks.com, a porn site. (...)
Blakely has several phobias, but her greatest fear is heights. “When we first got this apartment, I thought I might have to sell it as soon as we moved in,” she said. “And my husband was, like, ‘Why are you telling me this now?’ ” In addition to running his marketing company, Itzler is the co-founder of Marquis Jets, which leases private planes; the couple met at a poker tournament in Las Vegas (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were among the guests), after Blakely had become a loyal Marquis customer, figuring that if she panicked during a flight she could order the pilot to land. She travels constantly, to give speeches—she is also afraid of public speaking—and to tend to the charitable foundation that she started, with seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in prize money that she won after appearing on Branson’s show “The Rebel Billionaire”; she has so far donated around ten million dollars to women’s causes, a million to Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy alone. “I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying,” she said.
The couple hired a former Navy SEAL to devise emergency escape methods from the New York apartment, which is decorated in a modern rococo style, with ottomans covered in zebra print, ankle-deep rugs, maroon tiled ceilings, sequinned pillows, feminist art, and a silver chandelier in the dining room. Hidden behind the bar are jet packs and an inflatable motorboat. “We can jump out the window if we have to,” she said. Among her tasks as a contestant on “Rebel Billionaire” were nosedives in a 747 (“I also have a fear of puking,” she said) and a long climb up the side of a hot-air balloon on a rope ladder, to have tea with Branson at eight thousand feet. Blakely regarded these not as acts of masochism but as spiritual challenges.
by Alexandria Jacobs, The New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Josef Astor
