FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2013 file photo, Drew Barrymore poses for a portrait in promotion of the launch of her new cosmetics line "Flower" at the Maesa offices in New York. Flower products can be found... (Associated Press) 
 
 Business ownership is the latest must-have among women on the A-List. Stars including Halle Berry, Nicki Minaj and Drew Barrymore, have launched businesses in recent years that sell lingerie, bubby wine and lip gloss. 
 
 Here are some celebs that are cashing in on their star power: 
 
 Halle Berry, Scandale Paris 
 
 The Oscar winner's line of $7 panties and $18 bras went on sale at Target stores last year. "The line got off to a strong start when it launched in October and its performance continues to build," said Target spokesman Joshua Thomas. Berry wants to expand the brand into swimsuits and nightgowns, but first, Scandale Paris lingerie will be sold in more international stores later this year. 
 
 More info: http://scandale.com/ 
 
 Nicki Minaj, Myx Fusions 
 
 The "Anaconda" rapper co-owns bubbly moscato maker Myx Fusions with Mona Scott-Young, the producer of the "Love & Hip Hop" reality TV series on VH1. Myx Fusions Moscato comes in single-serve bottles and in three flavors: mango, coconut and peach. Up next for Myx Fusions is a line of fizzy sangrias, set to launch in June. 
 
 More info: http://www.myxfusions.com/ 
 
 Drew Barrymore, Flower 
 
 Flower, the makeup brand co-owned by Barrymore, sells lipsticks, nail polishes and other cosmetics at Wal-Mart. A website for Flower has pictures and videos of the actress and producer in a white lab coat testing foundations, nail polishes and eye shadow colors. Flower, co-owned by makeup company Maesa, doesn't advertise, instead it relies on the star power of Barrymore, who starred in 1982's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and the "Charlie's Angels" films. 
 
 More info: http://flowerbeauty.com/ 
 
 Jessica Simpson, The Jessica Simpson Collection 
 
 The singer, actress and reality TV star started her brand a decade ago. Its clothing, shoes and accessories are now sold in several department stores, including Macy's, Nordstrom and Dillard's. In March, she sold a majority stake of the Jessica Simpson Collection to brand management company Sequential Brands. Sequential said annual sales of the brand were about $1 billion. Simpson still has a stake in the company, and her mother Tina Simpson remains as creative director. 
 
 More info: http://jessicasimpson.com/ 
 
 Jessica Alba, The Honest Company 
 
 Alba co-founded consumer products business The Honest Company five years ago. It sells diapers, baby wipes, laundry detergent and other products. The actress, who starred in two "Fantastic Four" movies, told CNBC that the company had $150 million in sales last year. 
 
 More info: https://www.honest.com/ 
 
 Kate Hudson, Fabletics 
 
 The "Almost Famous" actress has a line of colorful leggings, sports bras and other workout gear called Fabletics. Each item costs less than $100, and is sold through the Fabletics website. She co-founded Fabletics with JustFab Inc., an online seller of shoes, handbags and jewelry. 
 
 More info: http://www.fabletics.com/ 
 
 Reese Witherspoon, Draper James 
 
 The star of "Wild," ''Walk the Line," and "Legally Blonde" fame started online shopping website Draper James last week. The company sells Southern-inspired fashions and home goods, including $125 shorts, a $155 tote bag and $175 sunglasses. 
 
 More info: http://www.draperjames.com/ ||||| It's Kombucha Thursday at the Santa Monica headquarters of The Honest Company, which means that groups of young, stylish workers gather at communal tables in a converted toy factory to slurp fashionable fermented tea. Jessica Alba, Hollywood star and company cofounder, sits in the adjacent room. She'll join her troops shortly, but for now she's transfixed by a box of tampons that looks more like it holds an expensive candle than Kotex. "Dope!" she declares, approvingly. 
 
 "We're using all-organic cotton and plant-based polymer and a bio-plastic applicator," says the 34-year-old actress earnestly, contrasting that with the plastic content of drugstore tampons and their effect on hormones. Honest's new feminine care line launches in July. 
 
 Alba can go similarly deep on almost all of The Honest Company's 120 products, whether the ingredients in a new organic beeswax sunscreen or the clever insulation pocket hidden inside a chic $170 vegan-leather diaper bag. Yes, she has a pretty face -- it seems as if every men's magazine has named her the most beautiful woman in the world at some point -- but it's the details from which great fortunes stem. 
 
 Details and hard work. Alba laughs about how she once worked an 86-hour week as the star of James Cameron's sci-fi TV series, Dark Angel -- the series that launched her career. Now, she says, she spends those 86 hours at a vintage teal blue desk, overseeing marketing and brand development for a company that feeds a growing demand for safe, nontoxic products, particularly among young helicopter parents who treat children -- and what goes near or inside them -- like porcelain. 
 
 Safety sells. The Honest Company has experienced an absurd level of growth. In 2012, its first year selling products, it hit $10 million in revenue. By last year it was $150 million, and industry insiders are predicting over $250 million this year. The company is focused on growth over profits, boasting a current valuation to match: $1 billion. 
 
 Free Trial Issue 
 
 That figure means Alba, who owns between 15% and 20% of the company, according to a source with knowledge of her investment, is sitting on a fortune of $200 million. She's on her way to earning a spot on FORBES' new ranking of America's Richest Self-Made Women, just $50 million shy of Beyoncé and Judge Judy, who are tied at number 49. The only other two celebrities to make the inaugural list are Oprah and Madonna. The difference is that foursome made their money in their core field, media and music. Alba, at a young age, has done it in a completely unrelated industry. But ask Alba and she'll tell you she and Honest are just getting started. "If we really want to make a difference in the world and people's health, it's billions and billions of dollars, not just one," she says, surveying the open-plan company floor from a conference room above its wooden rafters. 
 
 Like most great ideas, The Honest Company was inspired by a need that wasn't being filled. In 2008 Alba was newly engaged to Internet entrepreneur Cash Warren and pregnant with their first child. At a baby shower thrown by family and friends, she remembers her mother advising her to use baby detergent to prewash the piles of onesies she'd received as gifts. She used a mainstream brand and immediately broke out into ugly red welts, harkening back to a childhood spent in and out of emergency rooms and doctors' offices. 
 
 "She was the most sensitive child," remembers her mother, Cathy Alba, who wasn't referring to her daughter's emotional well-being. Raised on Air Force bases in such places as Biloxi, Miss. and Del Rio, Tex., Jessica's bad allergies and chronic asthma made her predisposed to pneumonia, which she contracted about twice a year, often leading to two-week hospital stints. 
 
 Now covered in hives again -- and wary of having her baby relive her own experience -- Alba spent late nights on Google and Wikipedia researching the contents not just of the offending detergent but also of everything in her bathroom cabinet and under her kitchen sink. "I was like, 'How can this be safe for babies if I'm having this type of reaction?'" she says. What she found terrified her: petrochemicals, formaldehydes and flame retardants in everyday household products from floor cleaners to mattresses. Some were listed on the ingredients label plain as day, with others disguised under the catchall of "fragrance," which is entirely legal. 
 
 Full Coverage: America's Richest Self-Made Women 
 
 Armed with Internet printouts and fear for the health of her unborn child, Alba first tried to shop around the problem but grew irritated trying to find natural and eco-friendly products that weren't either extortionate or seemingly designed for yurt-dwelling vegan yogis. Or both. "I felt like my needs weren't being met as a modern person," she says. "I want beautiful design like everybody else. But it shouldn't be premium-priced, and it should, of course, be safe." 
 
 She tried making her own cleaning products out of baking soda, vinegar and essential oils but wound up with something closer to salad dressing. So when she came across Christopher Gavigan, who for seven years led a nonprofit called Healthy Child Healthy World, she, like most new mothers, asked him what to buy. 
 
 "They don't want to be that investigatory weekend toxicologist," says Gavigan. "They just want someone to hold their hand." He explained that several companies with "green" credentials like Vermont-based Seventh Generation were doing good work across some product categories, but there was no one umbrella brand positioning itself as the go-to for all things eco-friendly, safe and nontoxic. 
 
 A lightbulb went off for both of them. Pretty soon Alba and Gavigan were polishing off wine on nights and weekends, cooking up a business plan and buying up Web domain names with the word "honest" in them. Through her husband, she met Web entrepreneur Brian Lee, a trained attorney who had hit it big with LegalZoom.com, an online legal-documentation service he cofounded with Robert Shapiro of O.J. Simpson infamy. 
 
 "I made some introductions for her and said good luck," says Lee, who looked at Alba's 50-page PowerPoint in 2009 but didn't bite. He says now he was simply tied up launching subscription shoe site ShoeDazzle.com with then partner Kim Kardashian. 
 
 Meanwhile, Alba was busy with her Hollywood career, starring in the likes of Valentine's Day, Little Fockers and Machete, all of which premiered in 2010. 
 
 Alba kept Gavigan on her payroll as a consultant. By 2011 she had turned herself into an expert on consumer products and traveled to Washington, D.C. to lobby for updated legislation. She was -- and is -- particularly focused on reforming the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, which has allowed more than 80,000 chemicals to remain in household products untested. Only five are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency; just 11 are banned from consumer goods. (In Europe that figure is more than 1,300.) "Enough people have to get sick or die from a certain ingredient or chemical before it's pulled from the marketplace," says Alba. 
 
 For Alba's husband, Cash Warren, it was a lesson in climbing a steep learning curve. "I didn't know much about all the chemicals that were in our consumer products, so she educated me on this epidemic," he says. "It felt massive, so I was a little reserved at first. She jumped into it headfirst." 
 
 She went back to Brian Lee in 2011 armed with data on the rise of childhood diseases and a much more concise ten-page pitch deck. Lee's mind had changed -- not coincidentally, he had recently become horrified when his young son was banned from bringing that classic, all-American lunch the PB&J sandwich to nursery school. Too many kids had severe nut allergies. "Autism, Tourette's, chronic allergies and asthmas and celiac disease -- all of this stuff is on the rise," Lee says. "I almost had this moment of awakening. Why aren't we doing something about this?" 
 
 Lee got on board with Alba and Gavigan that year, bringing with him a fourth cofounder in Sean Kane, who'd spent a decade selling discount products at Pricegrabber.com. Lee and Alba seeded their new startup to the tune of about $6 million, with another investor, according to a source close to the deal. (The company would not comment on initial investments or its founders' current personal stakes.) The group called their new firm The Honest Company, as a nod to its values and transparent ingredients. 
 
 ONE WALL OF THE HONEST Company's L.A. office showroom best represents its roots. On it you'll find rows and rows of diapers, mounted, matted and framed. Each has a whimsical design on the butt. There's one with a purple-and-green leopard print; there are juicy pink strawberries and a stars-and-stripes print perfect for baby's first Fourth of July. 
 
 These are the diapers that gave The Honest Company its start and indeed still account for a large proportion of sales: About 75% of revenues still comes from online commerce, and the majority of that is from the company's $79.95 monthly bundles of diapers and wipes. 
 
 During Alba's days scouring supermarkets for safe baby detergent, she often wondered why no one in the retail or fashion world had yet come up with seasonal designs for diapers. "I kind of want them to be cute," she says. "And the natural diapers: Why do they have to look like your baby's wearing a brown bag?" 
 
 After having her first daughter, Honor, in the summer of 2008 (in 2012 she had another daughter, Haven), Alba also found herself routinely running out of diapers in the middle of the night. She was toying with the idea of a subscription service for nontoxic household essentials -- cleaning products, maybe diapers, too. But this was long before monthly cosmetics-sampling startup Birchbox launched, and that business model didn't really exist. 
 
 Creating safe, chemical-free, nontoxic consumer goods from scratch without the infrastructure of, say, a Procter & Gamble or a Kimberly-Clark was a prospect that would cost way more than even the $6 million seed fund. So they went looking to get venture capital into the diaper business. "That's the only thing we pitched," says Lee. "It was very strategic as we knew that was the way into your home." 
 
 Lee was a known quantity among the venture capital firms of Palo Alto. Even so, The Honest Company took a gamble approaching backers without having made even a dollar of revenue. "They hadn't shipped yet when we invested, so it was a leap of faith we don't normally take in e-commerce businesses," says Neil Sequeira, a managing director at General Catalyst Partners. 
 
 He was a big believer in online-only models, having backed pioneering eyeglasses e-tailer Warby Parker. He also liked the subscription aspect of the business: It took much of the pain -- and expense -- out of acquiring new customers. "Assuming they like it, the big Super Bowl ads and stuff become less important," he says. Early on Honest relied on Facebook for efficient advertising instead of traditional campaigns. General Catalyst joined Lightspeed Venture Partners and Institutional Venture Partners in a 2012 Series A that raised $27 million. 
 
 That turned out to be just the start. As the diaper business proved its efficacy, Alba and her team -- Lee serves as the CEO -- reverted to the original concept: a single brand that carried its credibility across all products in the nontoxic universe. Raising a total of $127 million through August 2014, The Honest Company has been able to create more products in different categories -- dish soap, kitchen cleaner, detergent, nipple balm, multivitamins and even nursery furniture. 
 
 Lee, Alba and their team intended for The Honest Company to remain online, where its revenues grew steadily thanks in part to the actress "trying to yell from the rooftops," as she describes her marketing efforts. (She has over 5 million Instagram followers on her own account.) 
 
 But almost as soon as they launched, high-end mommy-and-baby boutiques with cutesy names (The Pump Station in west L.A. and The Upper Breast Side in Manhattan) cottoned on to The Honest Company, asking whether Lee and Alba had considered selling the brand in brick-and-mortar stores. Stock in these mom-and-pop shops sold out so quickly that when Costco came calling in 2013 wanting to sell baby shampoo in family-size packs, the Honest team relented. Since then Whole Foods, Nordstrom, Buy Buy Baby, Destination Maternity and even discount behemoth Target have started selling The Honest Company's wares. 
 
 Two things stand out on their short-term agenda. First, international expansion. Honest products will debut in South Korea later this year and in China possibly in 2016. And then, most likely next year, a public offering, according to people familiar with the company. Such a move provides a war chest, though that doesn't seem to be an issue at present. "The company's outperforming," says General Catalyst's Neil Sequeira. "They have pretty much unlimited access to capital and a very strong balance sheet." Liquidity, then, would seem to be the key driver. 
 
 With a big payday in the offing, Alba remains an active presence, much to the delight of her venture capital backers, who had built-in celebrity endorsement from a cofounder. "I think they realized they got a lot of bang for their buck," Lee says. Alba still makes the occasional film, but she makes quick work of it. She shot her scenes for the upcoming movie adaptation of hit series Entourage in three hours. In 2016 she'll appear in a sequel to crime-caper mainstay Jason Statham's The Mechanic. "It took ten days in November and ten days in January, and I got to be in a fun action movie," she smiles. 
 
 Such efficiency is important when you have 130 customer service representatives to train in all things Honest. All told, there are now 350 employees at two offices. 
 
 While Alba doesn't have the time to travel the country educating retailers, she now has the next best person on her staff: her mother. A year ago Cathy Alba came on board at The Honest Company, spending two weeks a month telling store managers at Whole Foods and Buy Buy Baby outposts across the country about her daughter's struggles with childhood illnesses. Cathy came out of retirement to take the gig. "I'm very much like Jessica," she says. "All or nothing." 
 
 Full Coverage: America's Richest Self-Made Women ||||| This story appears on the Mar. 26, 2012 cover of Forbes as 'American Booty'. 
 
 Sara Blakely stands topless at a conference room table. It’s Monday morning at the Spanx headquarters in Atlanta, and the founder of the hosiery company has been in a product development meeting for all of five minutes before walking out abruptly. She returns a minute later in nothing but a lacy taupe bra with black pants and beige wedges and adjusts herself in a full-length mirror, worrying aloud about the metal clasps on this early prototype. Will they create lumps under her clothes? Her CEO, Laurie Ann Goldman — petite and glamorous in a leopard print shift dress — tugs on Blakely’s straps. 
 
 The conference room looks like a boudoir designed by Willy Wonka: a jar of gum balls here, a loud houndstooth print there. Blakely hardly blinks in the presence of five colleagues and me as she removes the bra and tries on a second prototype. She’s been getting half-naked in public for the last decade, controlling every detail of the new category in women’s retail—shapewear—that she created from a one-product wonder sold out of her apartment. 
 
 Today Spanx is to slimming undergarments what Kleenex is to tissues: a brand that stands for the category. It nets an estimated 20% on revenue just south of $250 million. In recent months four Wall Street investment banks separately valued Spanx at an average $1 billion, a sum Forbes corroborated with the help of industry analysts. Blakely owns 100% of the private company, has zero debt, has never taken outside investment and hasn’t spent a nickel on advertising. At 41 she’s the youngest woman to join this year’s World’s Billionaires list without help from a husband or an inheritance. She is part of a tiny, elite club of American women worth ten figures on their own, including Oprah Winfrey and Meg Whitman. 
 
 Lots of women, from Betty Grable to Kim Kardashian, have put their butts on the line to plump their profiles and profits. Far fewer have had to overcome three phobias—fear of heights, fear of flying and stage fright—to master the art of selling. Blakely is on the road “always,” she says. She feels dizzy in tall buildings (it doesn’t help to have a Manhattan condo on the 37th floor) and often cries in midair. She’s unwilling to board a plane without her iPod, so she can play the same Mark Knopfler song, “What It Is,” at every takeoff. “I have sweaty palms, panic attacks, my heart’s racing,” says Blakely, whose Floridian roots you occasionally hear in her “Ah” for “I.” She once had to muster the courage to hawk her wares 6 to 12 times a month on home shopping channel QVC; now that Spanx is so well-known, it’s maybe once a month but for hours at a time. Blakely had early practice wrestling with anxiety when she occasionally did standup comedy. “Every time I went onstage I was so terrified I almost threw up,” she recalls. “I learned why they call it the greenroom.” 
 
 Spanx started as a one-woman show. In her first year Blakely shilled her new invention from a folding table in the foyer of Neiman Marcus, with a giant before-and-after photo of her derriere in cream slacks and bikini briefs underneath in one shot (an embarrassingly obvious Maginot Line) and $30 Spanx Power Panties (et voilà! no more line) in the other. 
 
 Over the last couple of years Spanx has depended less on Blakely’s face—and other body parts—to shift its shapers and stay ahead of a handful of copycats. The company is now run by a team of 125, only 16 of them men. It sells 200 products in 11,500 department stores, boutiques and online shops in 40 countries. Distributors worldwide clamor to get on the stockist list. “With international, we’re just warming up,” says Goldman. 
 
 Blakely would still happily pose in nothing but Spanx on the cover of any of the nine catalogs mailed each year to 6 million shoppers, but she knows Goldman, 49, won’t go for it. “I’m game for anything,” says Blakely. “The company has to pull me back.” Goldman, who created the first business plan at Spanx over the founder’s objections that it would stunt creativity, plays the straight man to Blakely’s more impulsive act. 
 
 Fueling her more impetuous side is her entrepreneurial twin: husband Jesse Itzler, 43, a former rapper from Long Island, who has backed and cofounded a few startups, including Marquis Jet, which sells fractional air-travel time. When I meet him at his midtown Manhattan office, he bounds up the stairs in a sweaty headband, his blond curls dripping. He’s come from an intense cardio workout with a Navy SEAL he hired to move in with him and Sara for a month. (This is more efficient than hiring rickshaws from his office, as he used to do, and paying the driver to be a passenger while he hauled the vehicle all the way home.) 
 
 Itzler regards Blakely’s accomplishments with amazement and amusement. “She’s 50% Lucille Ball, 50% Einstein. I keep a list of Sara-isms in my phone,” he says, referring to her goofy moments. “There’s something every day.” Recent example: wearing two different shoes, one red-soled Christian Louboutin and one plain boot, and having to hobble up the escalator at Bloomingdale’s. Legend: On the way to the Screen Actors Guild Awards one year, Blakely realized in the limo she’d forgotten her jewelry at her hotel. Instead of turning back, she had her driver stop at a candy store—and accessorized her gown with stretchable candy necklaces and bracelets. Spanx fans recognize her on the street, in stores and in airports and want to show their allegiance. “Women flash her,” says Itzler. “Imagine that. She’s just really good. She’s the best, man.” 
 
 *** 
 
 Blakely didn't set out to invent anything, but she always had a knack for hucksterism. The daughter of a personal injury lawyer and an artist, she grew up in the beach town of Clearwater, Fla., always looking to make a buck. She’d set up a haunted house at Halloween and charge her neighbors admission. Or, tearing a page from Tom Sawyer, she’d trick her friends into doing her chores by turning weedpulling into a competition. As a teen she pulled off a rare double act: popular blonde cheerleader and debate team champion (no performance anxiety then). 
 
 But tragedy eclipsed her sunny childhood. While riding a bike around her cul-de-sac, she saw a car run over her best friend, right in front of her. “I think that when you witness death at age 16, there’s a sense of urgency about life,” she 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.” 
 
 That same year Blakely’s parents separated. Not long afterward, both her prom dates died in horrible circumstances. She sought solace in her father’s Wayne Dyer cassette tapes, memorizing all ten volumes of the motivational speaker’s How to Be a No-Limit Person series. Dyer preaches “self-actualization” and “eliminating your erroneous zones.” She was so moved that she marched to her principal’s office to suggest they include the cassette tapes in the Clearwater High curriculum. Her friends couldn’t run the other way fast enough. “People used to fight over who had to ride home with me at night after a party,” says Blakely. “No one wanted to be in my car—they’d be, like, ‘No! She’s going to make us listen to that motivational crap!’” 
 
 Blakely started her first business in 1990, a kids’ club at the Clearwater Beach Hilton, charging $8 a child for a few hours of babysitting while moms and dads tanned. She was just out of high school, had no experience, no CPR training — and no insurance. She got away with it for three summers before trying to steal business from rival hotels’ summer programs. It was only when she went to pitch the Hilton’s general manager— age 20, in her first suit from Casual Corner—that she was busted. “He literally escorted me off the premises,” Blakely remembers. 
 
 After getting a degree in legal communications at Florida State, Blakely twice took the LSAT exam for law school admission and twice scored abysmally. Frustrated, she drove from Clearwater to Orlando to audition for a job at Disney World. Two inches too short to fill the 5-foot-8 Goofy costume, she instead spent eight hours a day on a moving walkway buckling visitors into their seats at Epcot’s now closed World of Motion ride. “I think I wanted to postpone reality, having spent my whole life thinking I’d be a lawyer,” says Blakely, who as a kid loved watching her dad in court. “It didn’t work. My first day at Disney I went on break and saw 
 
 Snow White dragging on a cigarette.” 
 
 After three months of misery at Disney, Blakely applied for a job she’d seen advertised on a billboard. She spent the next seven years at Danka, then a $1 billion Florida-based office supply company, now part of Japanese printer giant Ricoh. It taught her the art of the cold call. “They gave me a cubicle, a phone book and a territory of four zip codes in Clearwater and said, ‘Now go sell $20,000 of fax machines a month door-to- door,’” she recalls. 
 
 Blakely again found herself being escorted out of buildings. “I’d get business cards ripped up in my face because I was soliciting.” But with her easy charm, good looks and slick debating skills, she became, at age 25, Danka’s national sales trainer. 
 
 *** 
 
 Like many startups, Spanx began life as an answer to an irritating problem. The panty hose Blakely was forced to wear at both Disney and Danka were uncomfortable and old-fashioned. “It’s Florida, it’s hot, I was carrying fax machines,” she says. She hated the way the seamed foot stuck out of an open-toe sandal or kitten heel. But she noticed that the control-top eliminated panty lines and made her tiny body look even firmer. She’d bought a new pair of cream slacks for $78 at Arden B and was keen to wear them to a party. “I cut the feet off my pantyhose and wore them underneath,” she says. “But they rolled up my legs all night. I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to figure out how to make this.’ I’d never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn’t exist.” 
 
 Blakely, then 27, moved to Atlanta, set aside her entire $5,000 savings and spent the next two years meticulously planning the launch of her product while working nine to five at Danka. She spent seven nights straight at the Georgia Tech library researching every hosiery patent ever filed. She visited craft stores like Michaels to find the right fabrics. She sought out hosiery mills in the Yellow Pages and started cold calling, only to be told no repeatedly. Immune to rejection thanks to years selling door-to-door, she decided just to show up. At the Highland Mills hosiery factory in Charlotte, N.C., she was turned away, only to receive a call from the manager two weeks later. He had daughters, he told her, who wouldn’t let him pass up her invention. (Today the Spanx line is manufactured in 15 countries, including Thailand, Israel and Honduras; the cotton crotches are still hand-sewn in North Carolina.) 
 
 To save $3,000 in legal fees she wrote her own patent from a Barnes & Noble textbook, setting aside $150 to incorporate her company, but couldn’t decide on a name. After a succession of terrible ideas she settled on Spanks, substituting an “x” at the last minute after reading that made-up names sold better. “The word ‘Spanx’ was funny,” she says. “It made people laugh. No one ever forgot it.” In the summer of 2000 she spent evenings on a friend’s computer designing her packaging. She went for cherry red and, with the help of a graphic artist, created a blonde cartoon model with a long ponytail called Sunny—Sara’s animated alter ego. 
 
 Blakely flew to Dallas that fall to meet with buyers from Neiman Marcus. Current CEO Karen Katz was president of all the upscale chain’s stores at the time and remembers seeing Blakely in a conference room, pitching. “Sara’s effort was to solve an age-old problem for women in a modern way,” Katz says. She adds that Blakely’s obvious charisma and unusual backstory didn’t 
 
 hurt. “We were smitten from the beginning.” With Neiman in the bag, Blakely convinced Bloomingdale’s, Saks and Bergdorf Goodman to give her a shot. 
 
 Blakely was still working her day job at Danka, keeping her side business top secret, sitting up all night shoving Spanx orders into white padded envelopes from Office Depot. She was 24/7 customer service, answering phone calls from her bathtub or bed. Her then boyfriend quit his job and took care of shipping and handling. 
 
 Unable to shell out for advertising, Blakely took on marketing and p.r. She tore out journalists’ bylines from magazines and called them. She took over morning staff meetings at department stores to show sales associates why Spanx shouldn’t languish in the beige hinterland of the hosiery floor but be sold alongside womenswear and shoes. If that didn’t work, she improvised, once sneaking some red Spanx packages onto a rack she bought at Target and placing them by a cash register in Neiman. “All the staff assumed someone else had approved it, until they caught me on CCTV,” she laughs. 
 
 She connived her way to her biggest coup, shipping samples to Oprah Winfrey’s longtime stylist Andre Walker, who noticed the talk-show host started looking ten pounds lighter. In November 2000 Winfrey named Spanx her favorite product of the year on the annual audience scream-a-thon that was her Favorite Things Show. When Blakely got the call from Harpo Productions, she was warned to get her website ready, since orders would undoubtedly cascade after the show. Spanx didn’t have a website. “We took a color copy of the packaging and scanned it in,” Blakely says. “I ran a considerable Web business for $18 a month.” She resigned from Danka two weeks before the show aired. Spanx was profitable from day one, and raked in $4 million its first year and $10 million the next. 
 
 For the next two years Blakely constantly traveled to do in-store demos and local news appearances. In 2001 she scored a coveted deal with QVC, which turned her down until it read a Forbes story (“Footless and Fancy-Free,” Apr. 2, 2001) that described Blakely as an “accidental entrepreneur” who’d reinvented the girdle. So what if Spanx took the high road (Bergdorf ) and the low (QVC) at once? Women were buying like mad. 
 
 “Sara was out there shaking her butt and selling her product,” says Goldman in her office, next door to Blakely’s and furnished like an Upper East Side living room—velvet fittings, monogrammed Louis Vuitton trunks. Goldman, a ten-year veteran of Coca-Cola, where she ran the licensing division in 54 countries, came on board in 2002, first as a consultant, then as CEO. She was Spanx’s fifth employee. Her office was the kitchen in Blakely’s apartment in Decatur, but she knew that wouldn’t be the case for long. “I wanted to run Spanx like a public company from the start. I thought, Let’s get Ernst & Young to do our audits. They didn’t really do companies our size, but I said we were going to be bigger one day. We did the same with IT.” 
 
 As Goldman set about professionalizing the company, Blakely found a publicity stunt she couldn’t pass up. After six auditions she was cast on Richard Branson’s 2003 reality show, Rebel Billionaire, which aired on Fox in 2004. Her lawyers (and her dad) begged her not to do it. But Blakely says she wanted to meet and learn from the Virgin mogul. Branson saw it as another sign of her p.r. savvy. “She was already reasonably successful before, and she cleverly thought the show would help,” he says. 
 
 Leaving Spanx in Goldman’s hands for three months, Blakely won task after task—shocking her teammates and the crew. “I was cast as the girl who’d have the meltdown from heights on the first episode and lose her mind,” she says. Blakely followed daredevil Branson up the side of a moving hot air balloon at 8,000 feet, climbing a rope ladder the equivalent of a 17-story building. She’d be a world record holder if she’d remembered to call Guinness afterward. “Sara was the runner-up overall,” says Branson. “The only reason I didn’t give her the top prize was because she was already successful. She didn’t need a leg up.” Instead, Branson cut her a personal check for $750,000 to start a foundation. To date Blakely and Spanx have donated $17.5 million to charities primarily aimed at supporting girls and women—college scholarships in South Africa, homes for single mothers and their families (via Habitat for Humanity) and empowerment grants supporting entrepreneurship among them. 
 
 “Isn't my wife delicious?” Itzler asks aloud in an Atlanta restaurant, while gripping her thigh under the table. He’s flown in from New York for one day to watch Blakely speak to a group of jobless women seeking inspiration. With six homes—two in Atlanta, an Upper West Side condo in Manhattan, a Connecticut summer house, an outpost near Blakely’s brother in La Jolla, Calif. and a new place in Clearwater—he and his wife often miss each other. One of them usually has in tow their 2-year-old son, Lazer, named after Itzler’s Brooklyn-born greatgrandfather. 
 
 Blakely and Itzler met six years ago through Marquis Jet, an offshoot of NetJets. He’d come up with the idea of allowing travelers to buy time on private planes at age 27, after a few years in L.A. rapping (biggest hit: “Shake It Like a White Girl”) and writing sports jingles, including the NBA’s Knicks anthem “Go New York Go.” In 2006, when he planned a celebrity poker tournament, a sales rep suggested he invite Blakely, who by then was successful (and brave) enough to fly on private planes. Itzler had never heard of Spanx and Googled Blakely’s picture, thinking, “Yeah, she can come. Top of the list.” Each was hooked, even though both were attached to other people. They married in 2008 in Boca Grande, Fla. in front of Blakely’s early Spanx employees and Itzler’s friends from his years in the music and sports industries. “We had very successful people and, like, thugs,” he says. 
 
 Blakely had a moment of panic weeks before the wedding. She sat Itzler down at a favorite Upper West Side restaurant and told him the secret only her immediate family knew: just how rich she was. “She said to me, ‘I’m not sure you really know how successful Spanx is—[and] I am.’” Blakely told him the company pulled in not a couple of million dollars a year but a couple of hundred million. Itzler started crying. “I was just so happy for her.” 
 
 Itzler himself isn’t exactly poor. In 2010 he sold Marquis to Berkshire Hathaway, which owns NetJets, for an undisclosed amount. He now owns a stake in Zico, a trendy coconut water brand (Coca-Cola has 20%), as well as Voli, a low-calorie vodka, and Sheets, a caffeinated version of Listerine’s strip that dissolves on the tongue—all held through his 100 Mile Group, an incubator and marketing company. Investors in various projects include friends LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen. 
 
 Blakely has strong views about her wealth. “I feel like money makes you more of who you already are,” she says from behind a mirrored desk in her plush Atlanta office, stirring a bowl of take-out soup and exhausted from a sleepless, flu-ridden night. “If you’re an asshole, you become a bigger asshole. If you’re nice, you become nicer. Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away.” Most fun: anonymously buying dinner for an entire restaurant crowd at her favorite Japanese steak house in Atlanta or bidding on travel “experiences” like VIP trips to Paris Fashion Week and Sundance at the charity auctions she and Itzler attend. 
 
 Coming off its best year ever, Spanx has big plans for expansion. Goldman is pushing to double international sales, now over 15% of the total, within three years. She spends a lot of time jetting around Asia, laying the groundwork for Spanx in countries that don’t obsess about their posteriors quite as much as Westerners do. She and Blakely plan to open stand-alone shops, first in Atlanta, then slowly worldwide. They’re pushing their cheaper diffusion line, Assets, and adding new categories— swimwear, activewear, men’s underwear—as customers demand more options and competitors like Yummie Tummie, Dr. Rey Shapewear, Skweez Couture and Body Wrap (as well as Victoria’s Secret and Maidenform) flood the booming shapewear market. 
 
 Spanx is often the most expensive brand on the shapewear rack, but it hasn’t hurt sales. “If you have a great product, you can charge whatever you want,” says Noah Wrubel, CEO of lingerie site BareNecessities.com. “I as a retailer have no interest in a race to the bottom. Anyone can make a cheaper product.” 
 
 Blakely can afford to fund Spanx’s planned growth, but she and Goldman might, for the first time, consider a public offering or an injection of outside capital to speed things up. “We’ve been approached consistently from day one, and it was never something I entertained,” Blakely says. “Now, for the first time, I may entertain it.” 
 
 She still gets teary-eyed whenever she rides up the escalator in Bloomingdale’s to see the Spanx shop that opened last spring. “I have to pinch myself,” she says, hobbling in her different shoes, greeting shop assistants and adoring customers who recognize her from years of TV appearances. “Five grand,” she says, thinking back a decade. “Good investment.”
– Business ownership is the latest must-have among women on the A-list. Five female celebs who are cashing in on their star power: Halle Berry, Scandale Paris: The Oscar winner's line of $7 panties and $18 bras went on sale at Target stores in October. It's doing well, and Berry wants to expand the brand into swimsuits, nightgowns—and more international stores. Nicki Minaj, Myx Fusions: The "Anaconda" rapper co-owns bubbly moscato maker Myx Fusions; the drink comes in single-serve bottles in three flavors: mango, coconut, and peach. Up next: a line of fizzy sangrias, set to launch in June. Drew Barrymore, Flower: Flower, the makeup brand co-owned by Barrymore, sells lipsticks, nail polishes, and other cosmetics at Walmart. The company doesn't advertise, instead simply relying on the star power of Barrymore. Jessica Alba, The Honest Company: Alba co-founded consumer products business The Honest Company five years ago. It sells diapers, baby wipes, laundry detergent, and other products, and she said it had $150 million in sales last year. Kate Hudson, Fabletics: The Almost Famous actress has a line of colorful leggings, sports bras, and other workout gear. Each item costs less than $100 and is sold through the Fabletics website. Click for two more celebs who've started their own businesses, including one whose brand has annual sales of $1 billion.