4. Failure As An Exercise for Success

Many of us view failure negatively and  “failing” can cause disappointment, sadness, and possibly depression. We hesitate to try new things or new ways of doing things because immediate success isn’t guaranteed. Spanx, the billion dollar shapewear brand, would still be just an idea if its founder Sara Blakely followed the traditional path of launching a new product for retail. This episode explores how Sara’s unique approach to launching her business was influenced by her willingness to take action, in spite of the possibility of failure. Tune in to hear how embracing failure will ultimately help you succeed.

[ EPISODE 4 TRANSCRIPT IS NOW AVAILABLE ON MY WEBSITE ]

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Episode 4 Transcript: https://diamondbrands.media/brand-gems-episode-4-transcript/

Transcript

[0:00 - 0:34]

Hello, I'm Andrea Wade, the host of Brand Gems, the podcast where I highlight a person, brand or organization and discuss the key elements that contributed to their success. I'm a marketing strategist, brand architect and an MBA who likes a little fast company and Forbes mixed in with her Netflix Binges. I'm also a consultant who enjoys discovering those rare nuggets that make a business unique. Listen to Brand Gems for ideas to leverage in your personal and professional endeavors. Now let's begin the treasure hunt. 

[0:35 - 1:12]

Hello and thank you for tuning into Brand Gems. Failure, Lack of success, an instance of not working properly. A falling short or fail. Break. Breakdown, give out/ stall. These are a couple of definitions for failure. I venture to say that any person who has achieved some type of success has endured what might be described as failure or has failed at something. Did it kill them? Might have been uncomfortable, but did it stop them? Chances are they learn something. And they use these learnings to help propel them forward or to help them with whatever their next endeavor was.

[1:13 - 1:50]

There are a lot of famous people that have failures. Oprah was fired from her job as a news anchor. Steven Spielberg was rejected from film school. And then there's the story of a 17 year old Bill Gates. His first invention was something that was related to traffic and it failed to work at a critical time, which basically doomed the business. So he went on to his plan B, which was to go on to Harvard, only to drop out a year later. Do we call him a failure? And then there are numerous stories of people who didn't achieve their initial goal, but they kept going, they kept moving.

[1:51 - 2:33]

So this episode talks about how failing is an exercise for success, however you define success, or whatever metrics you use to determine success. Before I get into the case study, I wanted to share some of my own examples, and I'll keep this focused on the part of professional/ business related failures. But as I was trying to think of things, I realized it was actually hard for me. Not because everything I've done has been successful, that's not the case at all, but more so because I've been hesitant to call them failures. And when I gave that more thought, I realized it's because we have attributed such a negative meaning to the word failure. 

[2:34 - 3:25]

So whatever you call it, failure, or however you describe it, just something that didn't work out as planned. I think the key thing I'm trying to illustrate here is that it's these experiences that help us to move forward and to continue with whatever that next endeavor is. And the case study I want to get into, I'm going to be talking about her success, but I think what had a lot to do with her success was just her conditioning as a child and how she actually sought out, quote unquote, failures, or she sought out to do things that she was uncomfortable with or didn't know that well or anything. So that in a sense she could just try for the big things because she didn't have that fear or concern that it wouldn't work out as planned.

[3:26 - 4:19]

The case study for today is the brand SPANX, and its founder Sarah Blakely. SPANX spelled S-P-A-N-X. If you are a woman, you've likely heard of it, but in case you aren't familiar, please do Google it. SPANX is a line of undergarments think, shape, wear things to help make your clothes look better. As Sarah describes it, SPANX are a canvas for your clothes. Sarah's process for launching this company totally nontraditional. I mean, if there is a traditional way to launch a product that hasn't existed before, or at least all the avenues that she probably should have gone down, that maybe wouldn't have resulted in her success, she didn't go down. So again, she did it her way, and she was quite successful.

[4:20 - 4:53]

So, little background. Sarah graduated college, thought she'd go to law school, so she took the LSAT twice. That didn't go so well. She also wanted to work for Disney. She may have worked for Disney for a while, I mean, literally, like in the park, but she realized that wasn't going to be her calling either. So she started selling fax machines. This tells you how long ago that was. She was selling fax machines and door to door, not selling them in like a Best Buy or something. She literally had to go door to door and cold call companies in person to sell her fax machines.

[4:54 - 5:38]

So this was tough. I mean, she faced a lot of rejection and frequently would sit in her car crying outside of a prospective client's office. And it was at this point that she realized, as she describes it, this wasn't her movie. This wasn't what she was supposed to be doing. And she knew there was something else, even if she didn't know what it was. So one night she's getting ready for a party, and she wanted to wear her cream pants, some pants that she loved, but she never wore because of the underground problem. And any woman who has tried to wear white or cream pants, we know, we understand. She was concerned about panty lines, cellulite, see through, just all the things. And she needed something to fix that.

[5:39 - 6:51]

So she did something that probably lots of women had done before. She knew that pantyhose would help, but she wanted to wear strappy sandals, so she didn't want to wear the pantyhose. So what she did was she just cut the feet off of her pantyhose light bulb moment. She knew she had a product, now she just had to get it made. So she tried to figure out the prototype herself, but she didn't have any experience in manufacturing or sewing or anything. But she went to craft stores and used paper clips and elastic and tried to see what she could cobble together. But she pretty quickly realized she needed a manufacturer. So she went about trying to find one. And this was not an easy process. She made several calls and visits, and the meetings, for the most part, were not successful. She wasn't sure what she was going to do when actually she gets a phone call from one of the manufacturers she had visited, and he let her know that he had decided to make her product, not because he understood it or thought it was going to succeed, but because he had three daughters. And when he shared her visit, the story of her visit, and told them about her product, they told them it was a good idea.

[6:51 - 7:44]

So that was how she got her manufacturing partner step number one. She also was smart enough to know that she probably needed to patent her design. So she went to the library to do a lot of research and to make sure that no one had indeed done this before to see what she would need to do or need to have in place in order to protect her idea. She also didn't have that much money, so rather than get an attorney, she decided to research the process, and she actually wrote her own patent. And then for the final pieces, she contracted with an attorney, and she told them, hey, I've basically written the patent, but I need to make sure everything is filed properly and in order. So she was able to minimize her costs that way, and he handled it for her. So now she had a product. She needed distribution. So she decided that she tried Neiman Marcus.

[7:45 - 8:12]

She was in Atlanta at the time, so she walked into the local Neiman Marcus to ask about meeting with the buyer, and they informed her that the buyers were actually located in Dallas. So Sarah proceeded to start calling the buyer in Dallas to see if she could get an appointment. She kept calling. She would call at different times. And finally she reached her, and the buyer agreed to meet with her if she was in Dallas.

[8:13 - 9:11]

So, of course Sarah went to Dallas. So she's in the meeting with this woman, and she's explaining the product to her. She can tell that she's losing her she's losing her attention. So she convinces her. She asks her, hey, just come with me to the bathroom. The woman, of course, excuse me. She's like, Just, please, if you can just come with me to the bathroom. And so she does, I guess. Sarah was wearing her famous cream pants she didn't have on her SPANX. She goes into a skull and puts on her SPANX and comes out and shows the woman the difference. The woman ordered the product on the spot. I think SPANX had initial distribution in seven stores. Unbelievable story. She calls her manufacturer and lets him know “Hey, Neiman Markus bought it.” The manufacturer surprised just all the ways that it just doesn't happen like this, but it did for her, and it's a really inspiring story because she didn't know what she didn't know.

[9:12 - 9:51]

People usually go to sales reps and different things to try and get sold into stores, and she just went direct and part the power of her product. Once someone could actually see it, someone who understood the customer's problem and saw the value, the potential, there and she made the order, which was life changing. Something else that Sarah had done. If she had sent products to Oprah Winfrey, and someone on her team had put the products in her dressing room. Oprah put them on. She loved them. She featured them in her Favorite Things show, which, of course, is popular show, gives great exposure to products.

[9:52 - 10:53]

So this is the year 2000, right around the time SPANX had just launched. Sarah gets word that the product is going to be featured on the Oprah Show. I don't even think she had a website yet, but of course, she quickly put all of those things in place so that she could be ready for the momentum that, of course, an appearance on The Oprah Show would and did indeed generate. So SPANX continues to grow, and from then, she diversifies her product line. The company is still strong today. SPANX didn't even have advertising for 16 years. The brand was that strong. She did go on, I think it was QVC at some point, but in the initial years, it was just all word of mouth. Sarah, in early years, Sarah would be in the stores herself, and she'd pull in friends and different people. But again, the value of the product, the strong brand, that is what propelled it.

[10:54 - 11:33]

In 2021, Sarah did sell a majority of her stake in the business to Blackstone. The company received a valuation of $1.2 billion. The deal was monumental, of course, for the valuation, but also because it was prepared. It was a deal that was prepared by all female investment team. And the board of directors is said to be all female as well, under the leadership of Sarah Blakely as the executive chairwoman. Again, just a really phenomenal success story. And you're probably wondering, Andrea, if this is an episode on failure, why are we talking about this? Well, it's because of all the things that led her to this.

[11:34 - 12:14]

Again, remember, she set out to go to law school, and that was what she had her heart set on. But she didn't do well at the LSAT. She was selling fax machines door to door, and she realized that this wasn't her movie, this wasn't what she was supposed to be doing. She was also doing stand up comedy. I don't think I mentioned that earlier, but stand up. And I'm not sure if she really thought that this was something she really wanted to do or if she was just doing it for the exercise of, you know, pretty quickly if you're succeeding or failing when you're standing under hot lights in front of an audience, trying to make them laugh.

[12:15 - 13:13]

One thing that Sarah always talks about is the influence her father had on her. And one thing that he used to always ask her as she was growing up, how did you fail today? That was his way of encouraging her to take chances, to not be afraid that something might not work out how you wanted it to. He was encouraging her to have the experiences, to try different things, to go for that brass ring, for something that you weren't sure if you would achieve, but you were at least going to try. And I think that is what helped prepare her to launch SPANX and to build it into the success that it is to this day. Sarah set out to solve a problem. One that she had and one that it turns out many other women had as well. And that's a key brand gem for this week's episode.

[13:14 - 14:23]

If you identify an opportunity, there's a problem and you identify a solution, pursue it, go forward. Worst that can happen is that you quote unquote fail. Best that can happen is that you succeed. At the very least, you learn something along the way. There are so many key things about this episode. Sarah's experience with SPANX. One thing that I didn't mention earlier that she has said in a lot of her interviews is that she didn't tell anyone about her idea for that first year. She kept her head down. People that needed to know, like the attorney or any other manufacturer, things they knew, but otherwise she really didn't share the details. And part she says is because she didn't want her well intentioned friends and family to try to discourage her and she needed to get to a certain point where she felt there would be a point of no return. So she didn't tell anyone. She kept her head down and she kept it moving. She knew that she had a good idea, so she invested the time and money to get a patent. It took her two years to develop the prototype for Spanks.

[14:24 - 14:56]

She was scrappy and self funded. She invested in herself. Part, she kind of jokes now. She didn't know she could get investment, but the chances are she could have pursued investment and wouldn't have gotten it anyway. She just moved forward. So again, just to reinforce failures, if that's what you call them, are likely preparing you for something else. If you believe in something, you think you have a great idea, do the work, put in the time, put in resources if you have, figure out how to get it done. That's it for this week's episode of Brand Gems. Thank you for tuning in.

[14:57 - 15:06]

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[15:07 - 15:08]

Until next time.