Spanx is a word that most women are familiar with. It's a type of shapewear that helps to smooth away lumps and bumps and also leaves no trace of a panty line.

The creator of this product, Sara Blakely has been inducted to this year's Forbes billionaires list, which was released yesterday.

Spanx, an international undergarment company, is worth an estimated $1 billion. Here are a couple of interesting facts about her from a Forbes feature:

• She learned how to write her own patent from reading a Barnes and Nobles book and she saved $3,000 in legal costs.
• She worked at Disney World for three months and spent eight-hour days buckling customers into a ride.
• She's the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.
• She has never spent money on advertising.
• She owns 100 percent of the company.
• She went from just having $5,000 in savings when she was 29 to owning a billion dollar company at the age of 41 today.
• She has her eccentric moments, and her husband describes her as "50 percent Lucille Ball, 50 percent Einstein." Some of her goofiest moments include wearing a boot on one foot and a Christian Louboutin heel on the other in Bloomingdale's, and wearing stretchable candy necklaces and bracelets (bought from a nearby candy store) to the Screen Actors Guild Awards because she left her jewelry at the hotel.
• She witnessed a car run over her best friend when she was only 16, and facing mortality at such a young age has driven her. “I think that when you witness death at age 16, there’s a sense of urgency about life,” Blakely says. “The thought of my mortality — I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be any time that your number’s up.” 

This post originally appeared at SavvySugar.

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This post originally appeared at Entrepreneur. 

The most successful entrepreneurs have faced the same challenges that startups are grappling with today.

There are lessons learned that can help anyone who is starting a business.

Here, we offer a dozen of the best business tips from the entrepreneurs behind the big ideas in 'Trep Talk-- from picking a market to executing on your idea, plus how to determine whether you're really creating a viable business.

Spanx Inventor and Founder Sara Blakely

"Don't be afraid to fail. My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. "

More: Sara Blakely on Resilience

Mashable Founder Pete Cashmore

"You need space to try things and create. It takes a long time to recalibrate if you let people pull at you all the time. A lot of stress comes from reacting to stuff. You have to keep a certain guard [up], if you're a creative person. "

More:  Mashable's Pete Cashmore on Persistence

Gurbaksh Chahal, Serial Entrepreneur and RadiumOne Founder

"Many [business] people focus on what is static, black and white. Yet great algorithms can be rewritten. A business process can be defined better. A business model can be copied. But the speed of execution is dynamic within you and can never be copied. When you have an idea, figure out the pieces you need quickly, go to market, believe in it, and continue to iterate."

More: The Making of a 20-Something Multimillionaire Serial Entrepreneur 

Related video: 'Trep Talk EXTRA - Gurbaksh Chahal on a Business Idea Myth 

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SEE ALSO: 3 Rules Of Success That Made Nasty Gal A $100 Million Business

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While researching her book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery," author Sarah Lewis discovered the fascinating family story behind the wildly popular, body-shaping undergarments, Spanx.

The company's founder, Sara Blakely, was floundering for years before she started her company. Here, we learn the important lesson her father ingrained in her from a young age about how to process and learn from mistakes. 

Blakely is now ranked as one of the youngest, self-made billionaires.

Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis.

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The BI Life team gives us a crash course on Spanx. Spanx is an American hosiery company founded in 2000 by Sara Blakely.

The company mainly manufactures pantyhose and other undergarments for women and, since 2010, produces male garments. Spanx specializes in foundation garments, including undergarments and bodysuit shape wear, which are intended to give the wearer a slim and shapely appearance.

Produced by Joe Avella

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Sara Blakely went from selling fax machines door-to-door to the world's youngest self-made female billionaire at age 41 when she turned $5,000 of savings into a booming business: Spanx.

Her super-successful hosiery and apparel company, which she founded in 2000, started with one small, disruptive idea.

At a recent New York City Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship event, which celebrated young entrepreneurs from all over the world, Blakely shared her favorite exercise to stimulate innovative thinking:

"I stop what I'm doing, close my eyes, and ask myself, 'if nobody showed me how to do my job, how would I be doing it?' And then I see what surfaces," she revealed. "We're all on auto-pilot, and we're doing things because somebody else showed us — or told us — how to do them."

Blakely encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to employ this strategy, because creative ideas come when you think differently, not necessarily complexly. "I took an existing product that had been around for years and years and years — the pantyhose — and a pair of scissors from my kitchen, and cut the feet out of them," Blakely told the audience. "That is all that I did. I saw something that an industry had been looking at in one way for a really long time in a different way."

Ever since that fateful day when she made an incision in a pair of pantyhose, she's continued to think creatively, especially when it came time to sell her product. 

When trying to get Spanx into department stores, she called up the luxury fashion retailer Neiman Marcus, rather than taking the traditional route of setting up a booth at a trade show. "People were like 'how in the world did you land them?!' and I simply called them. I called the buyer over and over until she picked up the phone."

And when Blakely successfully landed Neiman Marcus, to ensure they would keep her product in stores, she called everyone she knew — even elementary school classmates she hadn't spoken to in years — asked them to buy a pair of Spanx, and mailed them a reimbursement check. 

One of the reasons Blakely has been able to think differently and take an unconventional — yet rewarding — path is because she didn't know any other way to do it. She used her inexperience and weaknesses to her advantage: "I'd never taken a business class, I'd never worked in fashion retail, I didn't have a single contact in the industry, but what you don't know can become your greatest asset if you let it. The great thing about not knowing how it's supposed to be done is that it ensures you are going do it differently." 

She even chose to surround herself with an inexperienced team. "Spanx was built by people who had no formal experience, especially for the first several years." This forced the Spanx team to continually ask questions, and "questions get to greatness," she said.

As for what's next, it could be reinventing crutches. Hobbling on stage with a broken leg, Blakely jokingly pleaded for someone in the audience to create a more comfortable option. 

You never know: if you start thinking differently, the way Blakely does, you could end up with a million (or even billion) dollar idea.  

SEE ALSO: How Sara Blakely Went From Failed Stand-Up Comedian To Self-Made Billionaire

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Most kids are asked questions like, "What was the best part of your day?" or, "What did you learn at school today?" at the family dinner table. 

Sara Blakely, founder of the billion-dollar hosiery and apparel company Spanx, had a bit of a different dinnertime experience growing up.

"My dad used to ask my brother and me at the dinner table what we had failed at that week," she told the audience at a recent Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship event in New York City. "I can remember coming home from school and saying, 'Dad, I tried out for this and I was horrible!' and he would high-five me and say, 'Way to go!' If I didn't have something that I had failed at, he actually would be disappointed."

This dinner table tradition allowed Blakely to see the value in failure. "My dad always encouraged me to fail, and because of this, he gave me the gift of retraining my thinking about failure," she explained. "Failure for me became about not trying, instead of the outcome." 

Having never taken a business class and having zero background in the fashion retail industry, Blakely's investment in Spanx was a risk to say the least, but one she didn't mind taking. 

Her gamble paid off — in addition to being named by Forbes as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire in 2012 when she was 41, Blakely also made Time Magazine's prestigious 100 Most Influential People list that year.

"A lot of entrepreneurs are held back from the fear of failure, so that lesson from my dad was a real gift," she told the audience.

Rather than letting fear of the unknown or of not being good enough dictate their decisions, Blakely encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to use inexperience and weaknesses to their advantage: "What you don't know can become your greatest asset if you let it." 

SEE ALSO: Spanx founder Sara Blakely reveals her secret for coming up with million dollar ideas

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The billionaire founder of Virgin Group has built an empire of companies across a variety of industries.

Much of Richard Branson's success can be attributed to the remarkably talented team of employees surrounding him.

How does he continually find the superstars amongst thousands of prospective job candidates?

Inc recently reported that one of Branson's three hiring rules comes from a conversation he had with Sara Blakely, founder of the billion-dollar hosiery and apparel company Spanx. She told him, "The smartest thing I ever did in the early going was to hire my weaknesses."

Branson builds strong and diverse teams by searching for talent in areas where he himself does not thrive. Rather than scouring résumés to find more "Richard Bransons," he looks for just the opposite.

"Don’t be afraid of hiring mavericks," he wrote in a LinkedIn post from 2013. "Somebody who thinks a little differently can help to see problems as opportunities and inspire creative energy within a group. Some of the best people we’ve ever hired didn’t seem to fit in at first, but proved to be indispensable over time."

SEE ALSO: Richard Branson gives 3 rules for hiring remarkable people

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NOW WATCH: Richard Branson Describes The Early Moment That Changed His Career Forever

"Sometimes million dollar and billion dollar ideas come into our lives daily," explained Sara Blakely at a recent New York City Network for Teaching Entrepreneurshipevent, which celebrated young entrepreneurs from all over the world.

"Sometimes they come and go, or sometimes you grab hold of them," she continued.

Blakely's billion-dollar idea, which turned into the booming business Spanx, surfaced one night when she could not figure out what to wear under white pants, and she made sure to grab hold of this idea — in a less than traditional way.

She first finagled her way into a meeting with the luxury fashion retailer Neiman Marcus. "People were like, 'How in the word did you land them?!'" she recalled. "I didn’t know it, but they had trade shows and most people in the industry would attend and hope Neiman Marcus would come to their booth. I simply called them. I called the buyer over and over until she picked up the phone." 

After flying to Neiman Marcus' corporate head quarters with a pair of Spanx in her lucky red backpack, Blakely managed to convince the buyer to carry her undergarment product in seven regional stores.

What she did next was truly innovative.

Worried that the department store would drop her product if it didn't provide revenue, she called everyone she knew living near the seven stores — from college friends to elementary school classmates she hadn't spoken to in years — dispatched them to purchase Spanx, and mailed them a reimbursement check.

Neiman Marcus kept Spanx around, and hundreds of other stores across several countries came knocking on Blakely's door.

Hustle doesn't always look pretty — but it can unlock the creativity and innovation necessary for entrepreneurial success.  

SEE ALSO: The surprising dinner table question that got billionaire Sara Blakely to where she is today

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In 2012, Spanx founder Sara Blakely became the youngest self-made female billionaire at age 41, according to Forbes.

As the company's sole owner, Blakely's ingenious invention has made her rich. 

Forbes currently estimates her net worth at $1.01 billion.

Though she's far less extravagant than other billionaires, she's still making the most of her success.

Sara Blakely was born on February 27, 1971 in the beach town of Clearwater, Florida, and demonstrated an entrepreneurial instinct from an early age. At Halloween, she'd set up a haunted house, then charge her neighbors admission.

Source: Forbes

After graduating from Florida State University, she struggled to find a job and ended up working at Disney World. She thought about going to law school, but crashed and burned on the LSAT. The only job that she could find was selling fax machines.

Source: Business Insider, Forbes

That job ended up paying off, because it prompted her to invent Spanx. One night, she couldn't find the right hosiery to wear under white pants, so she decided to invent her own. Her first "office" was her Atlanta apartment.

Source: Business Insider

Before she became the billionaire founder of shapewear company Spanx, Sara Blakely failed a lot.

She didn't make it as a standup comedian. She couldn't become a lawyer like her dad because she failed the LSAT — twice.

She even auditioned to play Goofy at Disney World, but because she was shorter than the required 5'8", they made her a Chipmunk instead, Blakely said on a panel at the Forbes Women's Summit in New York on Wednesday.

She spent seven years selling fax machines and was rejected almost daily. People would hang up on her cold calls and rip up her business card in front of her. 

"It was great life training," Blakely said.

Not only did she get used to hearing "no," but she learned how to get to a "yes."

"I had to learn to be concise, to tell them what's in it for them," she said.

All that training proved useful when she cut the feet off her pantyhose one day and realized she had a viable product: a slimming, seamless undergarment that no one would know you were wearing.

She kept her day job selling fax machines and worked on the Spanx prototype nights and weekends. While looking for a manufacturer to produce it, she spent months knocking on doors of North Carolina factories and getting them slammed in her face, she said.

"Who are you?" they would ask. "Sara Blakely," she would say.

"Who are you with?" they'd ask. "Sara Blakely," she'd say.

"Who is backing you financially?"they'd ask. "Sara Blakely!" she'd say.

Finally, she said, one guy "took pity" on her. After initially rejecting her, he'd reconsidered. He said he had daughters.

The rest, as they say, is history. Spanx is now a household name, and Blakely is one of the world's wealthiest self-made women.

The false starts and constant rejection taught her something profound about herself.

"One of my greatest weaknesses,"Blakely said, "is also one of my greatest strengths: being underestimated."

SEE ALSO: The fabulous life of Spanx billionaire Sara Blakely

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Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of shapewear company Spanx, has made a lot of mistakes along the way, but she's learned even more. 

Last week at the Forbes Women's Summit in New York, Blakely shared her best advice for entrepreneurs.

"As soon as you can afford to, hire your weaknesses," she said. "What you're not good at is usually what you don't like."

Blakely hired a CEO to run the business when Spanx was just two years old, she said. It allowed her to focus on the things she was particularly good at, such as marketing, selling on QVC, and inventing new products.

"Hiring a CEO was very critical for me to stay on my strengths," she said.

This echoes the advice of other successful entrepreneurs, like media CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, who advises forgetting about your weaknesses and betting on your strengths, and "The 4-Hour Workweek" author Tim Ferriss, who says 80% of results come from 20% of your efforts.

No matter what your personality or skills may be, understanding how you can add the most value is the surest path to success.

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In 2012, Spanx founder Sara Blakely became the youngest self-made female billionaire at age 41, according to Forbes.

As the company's sole owner, Blakely's ingenious invention has made her rich. 

Forbes currently estimates her net worth at $1.01 billion.

Though she's far less extravagant than other billionaires, she's still making the most of her success.

Sara Blakely was born on February 27, 1971 in the beach town of Clearwater, Florida, and demonstrated an entrepreneurial instinct from an early age. At Halloween, she'd set up a haunted house, then charge her neighbors admission.

Source: Forbes

After graduating from Florida State University, she struggled to find a job and ended up working at Disney World. She thought about going to law school, but crashed and burned on the LSAT. The only job that she could find was selling fax machines.

Source: Business Insider, Forbes

That job ended up paying off, because it prompted her to invent Spanx. One night, she couldn't find the right hosiery to wear under white pants, so she decided to invent her own. Her first "office" was her Atlanta apartment.

Source: Business Insider

Sara Blakely, founder and owner of the intimate-apparel company SPANX, is an artist. She has devoted the bulk of her professional life to crafting the perfect silhouette for women.

In 1998, Sara's wonderfully innocent aha moment happened when she cut the feet of her pantyhose to give her the smooth line she was looking for with her creme-colored pants.

She then took that simple idea, while maintaining her day job selling fax machines, and built a line of body-shaping products that are now indispensable to women around the world.

Here, entrepreneur and mother of four Sara Blakely (No. 61 on the BI 100: The Creators) tells us about her incredible rise and how she uses her company and her personal wealth to pay it forward.

Read more stories about the 100 business visionaries who are creating value for the world.

Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis.

Executive produced by Diane Galligan.

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It's not every company founder who plays a Britney Spears song at a company-wide presentation.

But "Oops, I Did It Again" was a key part of a recent meeting led by Sara Blakely, the self-made-billionaire founder and owner of the intimate-apparel company SPANX.

Blakely had organized the presentation around her "oops" moments, or the mistakes she'd made throughout the company's history. The goal was to communicate to employees that failure can be a good thing because it means you're trying something new.

"To encourage people to fail, I'm bringing up my failures in front of the team often," Blakely said in an interview with Business Insider. "I'm always openly talking about it."

In this particular presentation, Blakely went through a bunch of "oops" moments, some more recent than others, and assigned a theme song to each one. "Oops, I Did It Again" played while Blakely talked about a particular pattern of mistakes she'd made.

Blakely's celebration of failure stems from her father's habit of asking her and her brother what they'd failed at that week, when they were kids. If Blakely announced that she'd tried out for something and bombed, for example, "he would actually high five me and say, 'Congratulations! Way to go!'"

"What it did was just reframe my definition of failure," she said. "Failure for me became not trying versus the outcome."

When it comes to her employees, Blakely says it's important for them to approach their failures from a constructive perspective.

"If there's a failure or an oops in your life," she said, "if you learn from it and if you can laugh about it, then it's all worth it."

Alana Kakoyiannis contributed additional reporting.

SEE ALSO: How a decade of rejection rocketed billionaire Spanx founder Sara Blakely to mega success

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NOW WATCH: How Sara Blakely went from door-to-door saleswoman to billionaire philanthropist

Sara Blakely didn't have a business degree.

She hadn't started a company before. She wasn't especially familiar with the process of making clothes.

But what she did have was $5,000 in savings and a passion for the product she was pitching to manufacturers.

It was the late 1990s, and Blakely wanted to transform the intimate-apparel industry, rendering the old adage beauty is pain irrelevant.

Today, Blakely is the founder and owner of Spanx, a company with about $400 million in annual sales.

So what bridged the gap between the inexperienced 20-something then and the self-made billionaire today?

According to Blakely, it was her ability to bring a fresh perspective to the industry.

She told Business Insider:

"It's fascinating what people can do if you don't get hung up on, 'I don't have the specific training' or, 'I wasn't taught this in school.' Break through that because if you approach things with a fresh eye and you don't know how it's always been done, chances are you're going to do it differently and better."

For Blakely, that meant focusing on the way her body felt in undergarments, and not how they were technically "supposed" to be designed.

Here's Blakely again:

"I would put the product on and I would say, 'Something isn't feeling right, right here,' and I would be relentless about it. And after maybe 10 times of asking the same question, they [the manufacturers] would go, 'Well, the yarn is spliced there and there's a motor movement there,' and I would be like, 'OK, don't do that.'"

At first, Blakely said, the manufacturers were completely resistant to the idea of change. Eventually, however, they stopped responding to Blakely's ideas with an automatic no and started responding with "Let's see."

Bottom line: Just because you don't have technical knowledge about a field or an industry doesn't mean that you can't break in. In fact, your relative lack of familiarity may be an advantage.

You might be more sensitive to how customers experience the product — and what they're looking for in a new one.

Alana Kakoyiannis contributed additional reporting.

SEE ALSO: A self-made billionaire explains how Britney Spears helped her teach a key business lesson to her employees

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NOW WATCH: How Sara Blakely went from door-to-door saleswoman to billionaire philanthropist

CEO of Spanx, Sara Blakely, shares her thoughts on failure and success and how her father helped shape her ideals.

Produced by Emma Fierberg and Alana Kakoyiannis.

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Billionaire founder and CEO of Spanx, Sara Blakely, hosted a Navy SEAL in her apartment, per her husband's invitation. Here's what she learned from the man who pitched an oxygen-deprivation tent in her guest bedroom.

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From a young age, Spanx founder Sara Blakely was encouraged to take risks.

In a Business Insider video published this summer, Blakely said her dad used to invite her and her brother to share their failures at the dinner table. Instead of being disappointed or upset, he would celebrate their efforts.

"What it did was reframe my definition of failure," Blakely said of the tradition. "Failure for me became not trying, versus the outcome."

Eventually, Blakely began to find value in her shortcomings.

"My dad would encourage me any time something didn't go the way I expected it to, or maybe I got embarrassed by a situation, to write down where the hidden gifts were and what I got out of it," she said. "I started realizing that in everything there was some amazing nugget that I wouldn't have wanted to pass up."

While Blakely thinks "so many people don't take risks for fear of failure," she isn't one of them. Despite having next to no knowledge about fashion design, retail, or business, she believed in the idea for her now-ubiquitous shape-wear company wholeheartedly. She spent two years — and $5,000 of her own money — diligently patenting the idea, finding a hosiery manufacturer, prototyping the product, and successfully pitching it to Neiman Marcus, all while working a full-time job.

Business Insider recently caught up with Blakely at Cosmopolitan and SoFi's Fun Fearless Money event and asked if she's continued her dad's dinner-table tradition with her four kids.

"My children are really young, they're all under the age of 7. But I'm already having that conversation with my 7-year-old. I talk to him all about, 'What have you tried to fail at this week?'," Blakely said.

Though she said it's still a hard concept for him to grasp, she makes a point to celebrate his efforts, whether it be on the soccer field or at school.

"One of the parenting things I think is so important is not praising the child, but praising the effort," Blakely said. "And if he does things he's not good at, I talk to him about what he gets out of it."

SEE ALSO: What 17 successful people wish they'd known about money in their 20s

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NOW WATCH: How Sara Blakely went from door-to-door saleswoman to billionaire philanthropist

Spanx CEO Sara Blakely shares her thoughts on failure and success and how her father helped shape her ideals.

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