Sara Blakely: Develop a prototype for your unique solution

(calm music) - When you have no business background and you've never worked in fashion or retail and you don't know anyone in the garment industry, making your own prototypes is quite hilarious. So I was taking my own pantyhose, cutting the feet off and going to Michael's and Hancock Fabrics, and all the chain arts and crafts stores and buying elastic, and, I mean, at one point I even paperclipped it to the bottom, and, you know, then I was trying to hand-stitch it to the bottom just to keep it down myself, and when I realized that wasn't really working, I then had to turn to the manufacturing plants, and then that took us on a one-year experimentation with the machines of trying to figure out how to knit the bands softly so it wouldn't dig into the woman's leg, but stay down, and that's how I prototyped to begin with. But I literally went to the manufacturer and I had all these other products that I liked, and I was able to explain what I liked about each one of them, and that helped…