Spanx Founder Sara Blakely’s New Invention: High-Heeled Sneakers

Sara Blakely, 53, the inventor of Spanx, posted Monday on Instagram: “BIG NEWS!!! I’ve been secretly working on/dreaming about something for years. A new invention, and a new brand!” She’s launching it next Tuesday, August 20, and says it’s been in the works for nine years.

But today, there’s a website up, Sneex.com, that looks like it’s her next venture. It’s selling three styles in multiple colorways of high-heeled sneakers made of Napa leather, mesh, and suede, ranging in price from $395 to $595. The site also sells two colors of Sneex-branded silk ankle socks ($16) to be worn with the athletic-aesthetic stilettos.

The most expensive style, a $595 single-strap-heeled sneaker, is named The Tepper, after Blakely’s daughter.

She wrote on the site’s About page: “We’ve been fed the line that beauty is pain … but does it have to be? When people ask me, why shoes, why now? I say, “Have you ever worn high heels!?” I’ve been dreaming of inventing comfortable high heels since I started wearing them. But I was bored with the other options in my closet. I craved a completely new kind of shoe, something that sparked playfulness and made me excited to get dressed again.”

On her Instagram, the founder–who launched Spanx in 2000 and by 2012 was heralded as the youngest American female billionaire–says she believes it is her calling to support women.

Can high-heeled sneakers (or hy-heels, as Sneex calls them, in line with Blakely’s tendency to embellish branding with end-of-alphabet letters) actually support that mission?

An email to Sneex asking for comment did not receive an immediate response. But Blakely notes on Sneex.com: “It’s hard to change the world when your feet hurt.”