Joy makes things with cardboard when she was a child. Later, Joy grows up, gets divorced and becomes the mother of two young children. She works as an airline ticket clerk. She lives in a small house with two young children and her mother, who spends most of her time watching soap operas. Her father, Rudy, who is separated from her mother, wants to move into her house because his partner, Sharon, had throwed him out. Moreover, she is sharing the basement of the house with Joy’s ex-husband, Toni, who is an amateur singer.
Her father runs a garage business with her half-sister. Rudy is looking for a new partner through a dating agency. Eventually, he meets a wealthy Italian widow called Trudy.
The grandmother of Joy, Mimi, who also lives in the house,is the only family member who truly believes that Joy will be successful one day in life.
Later, Trudy invites Joy’s entire family onto her private yacht for a party. During the celebration, the guests spill red wine on the deck. While Joy is wringing out the mop that she has used to clean up the mess, she cuts her hands.
At that moment, she comes up with the idea of an innovative self-wringing mop. She is an entrepreneur. She sees a problem that millions of people simply accept as part of everyday life, and instead of adapting to it, she imagines a better solution.
She works on her mop idea together with her daughter, and she asks Trudy to invest in the project. She wants to earn a living by turning her dream into reality.
Joy with her mop. ©Image: https://www.womennow.es/
A patent search reveals that another businessman has already developed a similar idea, meaning that Joy have to pay royalties.
Joy tries to sell her mop to local shops, but to no avail . She is on the verge of losing the opportunity to become a businesswoman by creating something that genuinely improves people’s lives. The repeated rejections hit her hard.
Finally, her ex-husband think of an alternative, because he has a contact at the home shopping television channel QVC. Many people might have considered the idea unrealistic or even crazy. But this contact gives Joy the opportunity to present her mop to the channel’s executives, and eventually she is allowed to demonstrate the product live on television, and she sells some mops in this channel this day. It marks the beginning of her success.
This moment contains one of the most important lessons for every entrepreneur. Having a great idea is rarely enough. Innovation without visibility often remains invisible. Joy had already solved a real problem, invested time, accepted financial risks, and persisted despite rejection. None of this generated success until someone opened the door to a platform where millions of people could actually see her invention. The television appearance did not create the value of the product; the value already existed. Television simply allowed society to discover it.
Every entrepreneur needs not only creativity and resilience, but also visibility. Without visibility there is rarely commercial success, regardless of how necessary or brilliant the invention may be.
It’s amazing what can happen if you believe in your dreams and act upon them.
She put her product on the market, and women loved it. She succeeds in making everyday household work a little easier for millions of people. That is when the real journey begins.
Again, the film director, David O. Russell, presents the family as one of the barriers on the road to self-fulfillment. According to a Boston Globe critic, «they are the people we have to climb over to find ourselves, and they delight in making the climbing as rocky as possible».
This idea goes beyond the story of Joy herself. Society often assumes that family will naturally become the entrepreneur’s first source of encouragement. Reality is frequently more complex. Families usually seek stability, security and predictability, while entrepreneurship requires uncertainty, risk and persistence. Even without bad intentions, relatives may discourage ambitious projects because they fear failure, financial loss or social disappointment.
In Joy’s case, her family does not merely fail to support her ambitions. They constantly consume her time, energy and emotional resources. Every member brings another problem into her life, making it more difficult for her to focus on building her company. This is perhaps one of the film’s deepest messages. The greatest obstacle is not always the competition, technology or financing, but the environment surrounding the entrepreneur. Success often depends on finding at least one person, like Mimi, her grandmother, who believes in the entrepreneur before the rest of the world does.
Joy is the life of the TV shopping entrepreneur Joy Mangano. Born in 1956 in New York, Joy Mangano always was inventing things. At the age of sixteen, she designed a fluorescent flea collar to help keep pets safe at night. In 1978, she graduated with a degree in Business Administration.
She became the most successful seller in the history of the shopping channel, generating annual sales of more than 150 million dollars.
Jennifer Lawrence also highlighted the difficulty women face when negotiating without being labelled as «difficult» or «spoiled», reflecting an issue that extends beyond the film itself.
She won the Golden Globe Award for her performance in Joy.
This is the official trailer of the film: JOY
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«I don’t know anything about charts or business, frankly. But I do clean my own home, and I made this mop because it is better than anything else out there.» (Joy’s quotation).
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