Spanx boss gives all her employees $10k and first class flights anywhere in the world

Virgin Radio

26 Oct 2021, 08:56

With Christmas bonus season coming up, you might want to subtly make your manager aware of the generosity of the Spanx chief, in the hope that it might inspire them to do something similar! 

After her company was valued at a cool $1.2 billion after an investment firm bought a majority stake in it, Sara Blakely decided that she would celebrate by doing something nice for her staff. 

What did she do? Bring in some doughnuts? Give everyone an extra day’s holiday? Oh no, she surprised her employees with some seriously amazing gifts.  

At a party to celebrate the company’s new valuation, the shapewear brand’s chief executive and founder told her employees that every single one of them would be getting two first class plane tickets to any destination in the world. 

In a video of the event which has now gone viral on social media, Sara can be seen giving a speech to her staff. She is holding a microphone and spinning a globe. “Why am I spinning the globe?” she teases. 

She then gives the reason. “I have bought each one of you two first class tickets to anywhere in the world,” she explains. 

Obviously, everyone cheers, and some people burst into tears at her generosity. But the gesture didn’t end there. Oh no.

Sara continued: “If you go on a trip you might want to go out to a really nice dinner, you might want to go out to a really nice hotel, and so with everybody's two first-class tickets to anywhere in the world you are each getting $10,000."

Cue more cheers and more tears.

Sara started Spanx in the year 2000 with $5,000 in savings. Her aim was that the company would one day be worth $20m. In the video, she said: “To stand here today, and think about what we’ve been able to create and what we’ve been able to do by being authentic and kind and delivering amazing products to women to use their very feminine principles in a very masculine space which is business, leading with intuition, vulnerability … this marks a moment for female entrepreneurs.”

In case you were wondering, Spanx has over 500 staff, so that is a seriously generous bonus that she has dished out!