It was 1998. Sara Blakely stood in her Atlanta apartment, staring at a pair of white designer pants that had hung unworn in her closet for eight months. They were beautiful, expensive, and completely unwearable - at least not without showing every bump and line she wanted to hide.

She'd tried everything. Traditional girdles were too thick and left visible lines. Regular underwear showed panty lines. The newly popular thong was, in her words, "just putting underwear exactly where we'd been trying to get it out of."

Frustrated, Blakely grabbed a pair of control-top pantyhose and did something that would have horrified the hosiery industry: she cut the feet off with scissors.

The result was magic. Smooth lines, no bulk, invisible under her white pants. But when she tried to buy this product in stores, it didn't exist.

"I've got an idea for a product that's going to change the way women wear clothes," she would soon tell anyone who would listen. The problem was, nobody would listen.

What Blakely did next was perhaps the most crucial decision of her entrepreneurial journey: she told absolutely no one.

For an entire year, she worked on her idea in complete secrecy. While selling fax machines by day, she spent nights researching patents, calling manufacturers, and perfecting her prototype. She didn't tell her friends. She didn't tell her family. She didn't even tell her boyfriend.

"Ideas are most vulnerable in their infancy," she later explained. "I didn't want to spend time defending it and explaining it. I wanted to spend time pursuing it."

The hosiery industry wanted nothing to do with her. Every manufacturer she called - and she called them all - turned her down. Most wouldn't even take her calls once they heard she had no connections and no experience. One factory owner literally asked her to leave.

After months of rejection, one mill owner in North Carolina finally called her back. "I've decided to help make your product," he said. When Blakely asked why he'd changed his mind, he admitted: "I have two daughters."

With a prototype in hand and her $5,000 savings nearly gone, Blakely made the boldest call of her life. She phoned Neiman Marcus headquarters and told them she had a product that would revolutionize how their customers wore clothes.

They gave her ten minutes.

Five minutes into her pitch in Dallas, Blakely could see she was losing them. The buyer was polite but unconvinced. In a moment of desperation, Blakely did something that would become startup legend.

"Follow me to the bathroom," she said.

There, in the Neiman Marcus ladies' room, she performed a live demonstration - showing her white pants with and without Spanx. The buyer saw the transformation instantly. Spanx would launch in seven Neiman Marcus stores.

To generate buzz, Blakely called every friend she had near those stores, begging them to buy her product. She even offered to reimburse them. She stood in stores on weekends, personally demonstrating the product to anyone who would listen. She was running out of money, running out of friends to call, and running on pure determination.

Then Oprah called.

In 2000, Oprah Winfrey named Spanx one of her "Favorite Things." Orders exploded overnight. First-year sales hit $4 million. By year two: $10 million.

But here's what makes Blakely's story truly remarkable: she did it all without taking a penny of outside investment. No venture capital. No business loans. No partners. She maintained 100% ownership of her company, something almost unheard of in the era of Silicon Valley unicorns.

In 2012, Blakely appeared on the cover of Forbes as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. When Blackstone bought a majority stake in Spanx in 2021, the company was valued at $1.2 billion. To celebrate, Blakely gave each of her 750 employees $10,000 in cash and two first-class plane tickets to anywhere in the world.

The woman who once cut up pantyhose in her apartment had built an empire on a simple insight: solve your own problem, and you might just solve it for millions of others.

Today, when Blakely speaks to entrepreneurs, she shares the dinner table question her father asked every week of her childhood: "What did you fail at this week?" It taught her that failure wasn't the opposite of success - it was a necessary ingredient.