Sara Blakely Quotes

I love building companies; I love making products.

My father has a manufacturing company in Kentucky, and he's an electrical engineer. A brilliant man. A brilliant businessman. So he understands the business aspects of my business very well. My dad and I always communicate when I have to negotiate a deal.

I wanted control over the merchandising, the actual packaging of the product. That was a big factor. The only way for me to exercise control on all those levels was to start my own label.

I think an engineer has not matured until he or she has conceived of a product and participated in every stage of bringing it to fruition, if that makes sense. And not many engineers get to do all of those stages.

You have to get out there and compete. You have to work hard. People aren't just going to come knocking on your door and say, 'Please let me invest $1 billion in your back yard.' You need to be able to go and match the pitch and close the deal.

Like many entrepreneurs, I started out in sales. I began at 14, when I got a job selling shoes and tennis rackets at a pro shop, and I've been selling one thing or another ever since.

Designing a product and understanding how it filters through into the market and into the rest of the company is very important to me.

No one in my family had a retail or marketing background. They were professionals. They didn't understand just what I was doing by going into retailing. After I started, though, it got into my blood. I knew this was what I wanted.

I want to give other creatives the opportunity to find the entrepreneur inside themselves and teach them how to build their own platform.

As a young entrepreneur starting an enterprise company, be prepared for the fact that you'll need to get involved in enterprise sales. Everyone wants to speak to the founder, and this is also how you'll get feedback on your product. It's worth bringing in early somebody with enterprise sales experience.

I saw these new kinds of stores: the Body Shop, the Sock Shop, and I thought to myself, 'I can do that.'

My first account was Neiman Marcus. I cold-called them just like I had cold-called businesses when I was selling fax machines for seven years.

In the future, I'd like to make jewelry and sell it under my own name. But right now, I've got enough on my plate!

Playing all of these games, getting to know everything about the NBA, you realize that you are your own business. You have business meetings to go to, signings to go to. Like, I'm only 20, but the stuff I'm doing the average 20-year-old isn't doing.

I look at building business as a creative process that I enjoy.

We want to do sweaters for dogs and call it 'Bark Jacobs.' If it works, great. If it doesn't, we'll drop it and do something different.

In school I studied international business and marketing, so I've always been attracted to business.

I think you can fairly say I spawned or laid an egg that has turned into a lifestyle industry.

It will work. I am a marketing genius.

I had to learn everything about manufacturing, patents and how to run a business, and eventually I came up with an prototype that worked.

I wanted to build businesses from the time I was little.

I started working on a line of clothes last year, but right now we're kind of at a standstill.

Most Fortune 500 companies began as small start-ups whose entrepreneurial founders slowly developed the infrastructure, hired the staff, sourced manufacturers or built their own factory, and created distribution, sales, and marketing plans.

Nobody forces you to work at Wal-Mart. Start your own business! Sell something to Wal-Mart!

We don't really want to work for a corporation; however, we do aspire to one day make a barbecue sauce that doubles as a cologne, and we would like to promote that ourselves. We would like to create a cologne barbecue sauce benchmark of success.