What Spanx Teaches Us About Innovation

I had a deep thought while packing a pair of Spanx into my suitcase the other day, as I prepared to speak at a conference on the topic of women consumers.

For the three people reading this article who don’t know about Spanx, it’s the enthusiastically named “shapewear” product line that’s reinvented the category your grandmother used to call girdles. Except that Spanx are to girdles what iPads are to mainframe computers: they’re sleek, modern, ingenious and hard to live without – at least, once you’ve gotten used to them. If you’ve read all the stories about Spanx founder Sara Blakely, whom Forbes crowned last year as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at age 41, you probably had the same thought I did. Spanx is a relatively simple product that answered a huge unmet need in the marketplace. It’s a company valued at $1 billion…so why wasn’t it invented by a big brand?

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