Making Millions Off a Super Mop

March 31, 2006 — -- Joy Mangano's ride from rags to riches all started with a mop, a special mop. "I was just was tired of bending down, putting my hands in dirty water, ringing out a mop," Mangano says. "So, I said, 'There's gotta be a better way.'"

Up from Nothing: Amazing Stories of Starting at the Bottom and Rising to the Top, Friday at 10 p.m. on "20/20."

Her better way was a "self-wringing" mop. At first she sold only a few mops at a time with her kids helping fill the orders. Then Mangano found success when mopping met TV shopping, on QVC.

"At first, it was demonstrated on TV without me," Mangano said. "And it didn't do so well. They wanted to return the mop. They said, 'You know, a mop is just not going to sell on TV."

Mangano persisted, and sold herself to the producers.

"Brave little me said, 'You get me on that stage and I will sell this mop because it's a great item,"

And QVC took her advice.

"I got on stage and the phones went crazy and we sold out every last mop," Mangano recalls.

She says it was "amazing."

Today, she's a dynamo who's made a fortune marketing to the household products industry, and is now a celebrity on HSN, formerly know as the Home Shopping Network.

"As natural as it is for a parent to talk about their child, it is for me to talk about my product," Mangano says.

These days, her Huggable Hangers have become another TV shopping bonanza. "Now who would have ever thought in the history of home shopping that a hanger would be the single most successful product?" she tells "20/20." "We're rounding near a 100 million hangers."

If you thought a hanger was just a hanger, well think again. Mangano essentially re-invented a household staple. She made her hangers thin to maximize closet space and she made them colorful and velvety so clothes won't slip off of them.

For 20 years now, Mangano has been racking up mega-sales with why-didn't-I-think-of-that kinds of inventions. And she's had the creative knack since her teens, when she was working for a veterinarian.

"I realized that many dogs and cats were hit by cars at night and I said, 'There's gotta be a way to protect them,'" Mangano said. "Now way back then, when I was 16, I invented a fluorescent flea collar but I was too young to really know what to do. A year later a major pet company came out with a fluorescent flea collar and I said, 'The next idea I'm going to follow through with it.'"