Luck Is Not Market Research

Spanx: A Case Study

Sara Blakely built Spanx into a billion-dollar company. She's also fond of saying that gumption and persistence are all you need to succeed.

I want to push back on that.

Blakely succeeded despite her approach to market research, not because of it. She got lucky, multiple times, and the danger of telling that story as inspiration is that founders hear "just push through and it'll work out." Usually it doesn't.

This is one of the most common problems I see. It's so common that the Small Business Innovation Research program had to build commercialization planning into its requirements because founders kept showing up with real products and no understanding of where those products actually belonged in the market.

Here's what Blakely's market research looked like: she talked to one employee at one high-end department store. Based on that single conversation, she decided Neiman Marcus was her target. She spent months pursuing that path.

Her pivotal sales meeting only succeeded because she convinced the buyer to come to the bathroom for a live demo. That's not a repeatable strategy. That's a Hail Mary that happened to work because the buyer was willing to say yes.

And after she got the contract and her product was on Neiman Marcus shelves, she realized she'd been wrong. Spanx didn't belong in the hosiery department of a luxury store. It belonged near checkout at Target - convenient, impulse-buy territory.

So she made homemade display stands, filled them with product, and placed them in Target stores without a contract. It only worked because everyone at Target assumed someone else had approved it.

That's three moments where the whole thing could have collapsed. One less agreeable buyer, one Target employee who asked questions, and the story ends differently.

If Blakely had talked to more than one person - employees at different stores, different price points, different retail contexts - she might have figured out where her product belonged before spending months chasing the wrong channel.

Here's what real market research looks like:

Talk to more than one person. One data point isn't research. It's a guess with extra steps.

Talk to people in different contexts. An employee at Neiman Marcus sees a different customer than an employee at Target. You need both perspectives to understand where your product fits.

Ask where people would actually look for this. Not where you think it should go - where would a customer expect to find it? What's the purchase context?

Gumption matters. Persistence matters. But they're not substitutes for actually understanding your market before you commit months of effort to the wrong path.