She ‘cleaned up’ on HSN. Now Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano is leaving the network
Home shopping queen Joy Mangano, the Long Island single mother of three who created the Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangers, is leaving HSN.
The home shopping network announced that Mangano left to “pursue other professional opportunities,” the Tampa Bay Times reported. HSN headquarters are located in St. Petersburg, Florida.
“Mangano has quite literally cleaned up, ascending to the top of a $1 billion empire on HSN ($3 billion in her career to date) with genius housewife hacks, like the space-saving Huggable Hangers ... and the travel-size My Little Steamer,” Vogue magazine wrote in 2015.
That was the year Mangano became a name outside the world of home shopping when Jennifer Lawrence portrayed her rise to riches in the movie, “Joy.”
“She has been an important part of the family for many years, and her creativity has influenced us all,” Mike Fitzharris, president of HSN, said in announcing her departure, according to WWD.
Mangano invented the self-wringing Miracle Mop, touted as “the last mop you’ll ever have to buy,” and introduced it to the world on home shopping network QVC in 1992, WWD reports.
Then, she sold “her highly successful company, Ingenious Designs, to HSN in 1999” and “continued working with HSN, becoming a face of the network,” wrote the Times, which called her the “Queen of HSN.”
“Her HSN hanger sales broke records, with more than 800 million units sold.”
Vogue described the movie “Joy” as “the Cinderella story of how a once-broke, divorced mother of three in 1990 invented the first self-wringing Miracle Mop, remortgaged her home to help fund it, manufactured it out of her father’s (Robert De Niro) auto body shop, and convinced a fictional QVC exec (Bradley Cooper) to give her a shot.”
Entertainment Weekly sniffed that “a movie about a mop might feel a little quixotic.” But seeing her life on the big screen made her cry, Mangano told a Vogue writer during an interview at Mangano’s Long Island mansion, called “Swan Manor.”
The article described how Mangano was inspired to create Huggable Hangers during a visit to a showroom of couture clothing, “zeroing in on how a thick, velvet-sheathed hanger kept a heavily beaded $10,000 gown perfectly in place.
“’Oh, so the friction . . .” Mangano thought, wheels spinning. ‘There is a science to that hanger.’ ”
She shared other secrets to her success in a book published last year called “Inventing Joy.”
“The difference between myself and someone else, who may not have achieved what they wanted to, is to have the courage to keep going forward,” she told the Long Island Press. “You have to have that ability to believe in yourself. . . .
“I ended up on TV with a product, which was never my goal. I wanted to be in Kmarts across the country. I followed wherever that path went and just kept on going.”
HSN will still sell Huggable Hangers, My Little Steamer and Mangano’s other products, Fitzharris said in his statement, the Times reported.
“We and our customers are enormously grateful for all that Joy has done for our shopping community,” his statement said. “She has been an important part of the family for many years, and her creativity has influenced us all. We thank her for her contributions.”
This story was originally published December 21, 2018 at 4:15 PM with the headline "She ‘cleaned up’ on HSN. Now Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano is leaving the network."