For some of the world’s richest, self-made women, billionaire status is not even the most interesting thing about them.
Forbes recently published its first list of the wealthiest sisters doing it for themselves. These self-made women all worked hard for their billions, but some of them navigated colorful speed-bumps, early jobs and offbeat business strategies that helped form the foundations of their riches.
Before Diane Hendricks became the richest self-made woman on the list, worth $15 billion through her building supply company, ABC Supply, created in conjunction with her husband, she strutted her stuff for Hugh Hefner’s company.
Hendricks, now 76, worked as a Playboy Bunny in the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Playboy Club during the late 1960s.
The job helped make ends meet for the future entrepreneur and her child, who she had after getting pregnant at age 17, marrying the father and divorcing three years later.
As for the Playboy gig, she told Forbes, “I don’t hide the fact. It’s a glorified waitress. I was over there for about a year, making enough money to raise a son.”
Doris Fisher, 14th on the list and worth $2.3 billion, was one of the first women to receive an economics degree from Stanford University when she graduated in the 1950s.
But earning big bucks was not on her mind when she and her now deceased husband Don opened the first Gap store in San Francisco, in 1969.
Doris, now 91, just wanted to find a pair of jeans that would decently fit his slender frame. That quest began when Don, who was refurbishing old hotels, leased space to a guy selling Levi’s.
He bought a couple pair of jeans from the man. Not only did the pants not fit him, but, when Doris went on a quest to find a pair that actually did, she came up empty.
Literally seeing a gap in the market, she and Don launched a business that brought cool and casual to mass-market retail.
Marian Ilitch, now 90, started out as the baseball wife of a struggling minor leaguer with a bum knee.
But her husband Mike’s ingenuity with pizza dough, her touch for business and the couple’s willingness to pose for interesting photos, landed her in the number-eight spot on the Forbes list with a worth of $4 billion.
Together they started Little Caesars Pizza and got the ultimate sports-world revenge: in 1982, Ilitch Holdings bought the Detroit Red Wings hockey team and, not long after, the Detroit Tigers baseball team.
Bringing up the rear (for the list and for women) Sara Blakely, 52, earned number 22 from Forbes with her line of Spanx body enhancers.
Before devising the undergarment, which started when Blakely snipped the feet from a pair of tights so she would look better in a pair of hip-hugging white slacks, she did not exactly seem destined for the C-suite life.
Blakely bombed out of her LSAT law exam in the 1990s and found herself at loose ends. So, she told Glamour, “I drove to Disney World and tried out to be Goofy. Unfortunately, you have be 5’ 8” to play Goofy and I’m only 5’ 6”. So I got the part of the chipmunk instead.”
But before she could be outfitted for a costume, Blakely quit Disney and took a job selling fax machines door to door while doing stand-up comedy on the side.
It was while working the sales job that she cut the feet from her tights and eventually came to be worth $1.1 billion.
A brush with allegedly darker dealings is part of the back story for Lynda Resnick, 80, who is number four on the list, worth $5.3 billion, thanks to her and husband Stewart’s Wonderful Company, which ranks among the largest farming firms in the United States in addition to owning POM Wonderful and Fiji Water.
A natural-born go-getter, Resnick launched her own advertising agency at age 19, after dropping out of college.
The Vietnam War was raging and Resnick’s agency, Lynda Limited, took assignments from antiwar organizations. A guy she was going out with, Anthony Russo, dropped by with his political-activist pal Daniel Ellsberg.
He asked to use the agency’s copy machine to print multiples of military documents that proved to be top-secret.
Outlining previously unknown information about the war – such as John F. Kennedy’s administration helping to oust and kill South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem – the docs were leaked to the New York Times, which published them. They were dubbed the Pentagon Papers and their release caused a stir with federal prosecutors who discovered the source of the copies.
Resnick was named an unindicted co-conspirator, though charges were ultimately dropped. As Resnick put it to the New Yorker in 2008, “I knew conceptually what I was copying but I didn’t read it.”
