Sara Blakely Had to Get on Forbes to Book QVC

I have a story about, you just reminded me, I forgot that I was in Forbes in 2001, which was, you know, I was running Spanx out of my apartment in Atlanta. I had semi-trucks pulling up with boxes of Spanx in this neighborhood, and they drop them off at my apartment, and a lot of times they leave them in front of the front door, and then I have to go knock on the neighbors and say, "So I can get into my house?" And packing and shipping, and I had been trying to get on QVC, which was interesting because Spanx was sold at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, all the very high-end retailers, and I wanted to be on QVC, and I had several people say, "Sara, don't do that, you'll kill your brand if you do that." And I said, "No, I'm not going to discount my price." They said, "Everyone discounts their price on QVC." That's what I learned. What the "V" in QVC meant when I met with them, "Do you know what the V stands for?" "Victor," "Did Victor start this company?" He was like, "Value." And I said, "Well," and I remember I talked to them about, you don't have a lot of products that are also sold at Neiman Marcus. I saw QVC as an entrepreneur without a lot of money as my ad, my free ad. If I could be the one on camera explaining what this product was, that it would be helpful. Where Forbes played in is I had been calling them and calling them, and they would not take me. They were not willing to put me on air. And then the Forbes article ran, and I got a phone call after being rejected for like over a year. And they said, "We're going to give Spanx a chance." To the same buyer who'd been saying no to me, and I said, "Why the change of heart?" "My boss saw the Forbes article." I was like. She had a very smart boss then, you got my foot in the door at QVC.