For more than one generation, Spanx brings up associations not only of a popular shapewear brand but of a bootstrap business success story born from a sudden idea.
Founder Sara Blakely famously became the world's youngest female self-made billionaire after struggling to find the right undergarments to wear under a pair of white pants and realizing that her solution — cutting off the top of a pair of pantyhose — had business potential.
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More than twenty years later, Spanx is in a new era where the brand is well-known and beloved worldwide but the culture around beauty has gone through a tidal shift.
Spanx VP Brand & Integrated Marketing Andrea Port talked to TheStreet about Spanx history and its efforts to bring the brand to a new type of consumer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TheStreet: Spanx was launched in the year 2000 by Sara Blakely. Brands that have developed a loyal following over the years often face a push and pull between staying true to origins and leading the brand into a modern era. Is that the case with Spanx?
Port: When I joined the company in June 2023, Spanx was at an interesting time where we had started to move into the activewear and apparel business with of course our core business still being our shapewear heritage. We really increased our SKU count in the other categories and are increasing that even more come fall. So this was kind of the time to say 'hey, thank you for supporting the business you have known and loved since Sara brought it forward into the marketplace but we have so much more than shapewear. Shapewear is not going away but we have all this other stuff that is going to be perfect for your life.'
Spanx
'Show where we are today and where we're going...'
For Women's History Month, you recently debuted a "We Live In Spanx" campaign meant to highlight your other offerings.
Yes. It was very exciting to work on and it's also really helping us drive awareness for different parts of our business. We've been really emotional about those categories and have really refined the product in order to get where we are today and where we're going. This was pretty much the first time that we could take all that innovation and show it to the public in an elevated way with more brand awareness.
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You'll notice that you don't see shapewear in this campaign and that is a question that we got a lot when we were bringing this campaign to life. People were asking 'why are you not showing shapewear?' and it's because we have such tremendous awareness in that category already. We like to say that we're the Kleenex of shapewear, we sort of invented that category. With this campaign, it was really important to show the outer layer and show a woman in her full life.
'We want women to feel good while getting dressed...'
Spanx launched at a time when thinness as beauty was pretty explicitly promoted in advertising, culture and media. Twenty years later, the culture has made a massive shift toward loving yourself as you are and "beauty at every size." Is this campaign an effort to move Spanx into this era?
100%. One of our reasons behind casting the way we did is that we wanted to look for women who look more real and women who personified this modern woman. In the opening scene of our video, you have Allyson Felix, who's the most decorated track and field athlete plus an entrepreneur plus a mom, and she's taking a Zoom (ZTNO) call from her computer in in her home. I think everyone has had that experience in the past few years. It was very important to us when we started casting this to show that all of the women in the campaign live this multifaceted life. Showing all the roles that women play throughout their day was important to us.
At this point, business schools teach Spanx as an example of a business success story that was born from a sudden idea. It is also a female-founded business that came from truly knowing and understanding your customer. While Blakely sold Spanx in 2021, can you talk a bit about how this influences the brand today?
The story of Sara [cutting off the top of her control top pantyhose and seeing a business opportunity] is legendary and still carries through into the company today. It's a 20 year old business but we still feel like a start-up in many ways. We are still women-run and women-led so Spanx does have that essence that you don't really get anywhere else. We also really want to help out other entrepreneurs which is why we feature women in our campaign, we really want to be the brand that has that throughline with everything we do. Our product is women-led and it's also designed for women's bodies. We want them to feel good while getting dressed.
