#GIRLBOSS

by Sophia Amoruso

  Dealing vintage is like dealing drugs—you never reveal your source. It’s natural that sellers are ultracompetitive. Hell, I thrive on competition! But eBay taught me that some people prefer to compete in ways I’d never imagined. While I was busy shooting, editing, and uploading my auctions, sneaky competitors trolled my listings to look for things to report. For example, it was against eBay policy to link to an outside website, social media or otherwise, from your listings. However, it was common practice among sellers to link to their MySpace pages—almost everyone did. But still, it sucked when you got caught. It just took one sneaky seller with too much time on her hands to report all of my auctions, and bam, all of my hard work for the entire week simply vanished. I had to redo everything manually, killing an entire day of an already packed week.

  I became Internet “friends” with some other sellers, but on the whole, it was a pretty catty environment. Cutting my teeth on eBay was actually a pretty great way to toughen me up for the cutthroat world of business. Nasty Gal Vintage showed up, guns blazing, out of nowhere, and in no time it was one of the most successful stores in its category. What made me successful wasn’t necessarily what I sold, but how I sold it. The photography and styling wasn’t even that professional—it was usually a one-girl team of me, in a driveway—but it was still leagues ahead of my competition. Instead of spending my time trolling the forums and obsessing about what other sellers were doing, I focused on making my store as unique as possible. My customers responded—they were willing to pay more at Nasty Gal Vintage than they were at other stores. This, of course, did not go over well. It upset a lot of the other sellers that my stuff was going for so much, so the forums collectively decided that the only explanation for my high sales was that I was shill bidding, which is when someone creates a fake account to bid on their own auctions and force up the prices. I took it all in stride. Nasty Gal Vintage was growing by the day and I was busting ass to keep up, so there was no way I was going to waste precious hours engaging in Internet catfights. It seemed like a pointless waste of time, but it soon got too annoying to ignore.

  Whoa Is Me: The Purple Flapper Dress Saga

  Toward the end of my time on eBay in early 2008, I bought a flapper dress that had probably been a costume at one point. It was purple polyester and I styled it like a cute going-out dress. It sold for $400, and the girl who bought it was actually another eBay vintage seller, who wore it to her bachelorette party in Las Vegas.

  But the eBay forums lit up. The forum trolls claimed that she and I were in cahoots, bidding on each other’s stuff to drive up the prices, and that my dress wasn’t even vintage. I had never claimed that this was a dress from the flapper era, and if the girl who bought it wasn’t happy with it, I’d gladly have taken it back—but she loved the dress and felt she got what she paid for.

  When noted fashion blogger Susie Bubble wrote about Nasty Gal Vintage in 2008, the comments section turned into a total catfight mostly related to what one commenter called “the purple flapper dress saga.” Some people were defending me; others were leaving comments claiming that I had “risen to the top of the eBay heap based on FALSEHOODS and LIES.” Finally, it frustrated Susie so much that she intervened. “I can’t know everything and frankly . . . sometimes I just don’t want to . . . ,” she wrote. I stayed out of it, keeping my head down and doing my best as I’ve always done.

  At this time, I was already planning to leave eBay because the business was growing so quickly and I was ready for the next step. With Nasty Gal Vintage, I had finally found something that I was good at and kept me engaged. I was beginning to see that it had potential far beyond anything that I had ever imagined, and to see that potential I’d have to go out on my own. However, this didn’t make all the shit talking any easier to take. eBay was my whole world, and I looked up to a lot of those other sellers. Regardless, eBay made the choice for me. My account was suspended just as I was about to launch the website. The reason? Doing what I did best—getting free marketing. I was leaving the URL of my future website in the feedback area for my customers.

  No More Auctions

  Finally, after a year and a half, I had outgrown the pool house. I moved the business into a one-thousand-square-foot loft in an old shipyard in Benicia, California—even farther from all of my friends in the city. I bought the URL nastygalvintage.com, because at the time, nastygal.com was still registered to a porn site (sorry, moms!). I enlisted my middle school friend Cody, who was a developer. I did the graphic design and he did the programming. We picked out the e-commerce platform together, and he made it work. It was the first and last website I’ve ever designed.

  When you leave eBay, you can’t take your customer information with you. While I had none of my customers’ e-mail addresses, I had my sixty thousand friends on MySpace to fall back on. When the Nasty Gal Vintage site launched on Friday the 13th of June 2008, everything sold out in the first day. Kelly Ripa’s stylist called and asked if I had another one of those vintage jackets, but in an Extra Small? Um, no, I did not.

  Soon after, I hired my first employee, Christina Ferrucci. For the first year, I paid her more than I was paying myself. She haggled from $14 an hour to $16, both of which were more than I’d ever been paid, and in the back of my head, I was worried about whether I’d be able to keep her busy. But she was worth that, and more, and she was definitely busy. On her second week of work, she got so sick on her way in that she threw up in her car while driving and just kept right on, finally making her way to work. In she came, packed a bunch of orders, drove to the post office and shipped them, then went back home and crawled into bed. Christina is still with me today and is now Nasty Gal’s buying director. If business is war, I always think that’s the kind of #GIRLBOSS I want next to me in the trenches.

  After over two years of selling exclusively vintage, I wanted to give our customer more of what she wanted. We were already good at curating ultra-memorable editorial vintage pieces for her, so why not curate new things as well? I was getting tired of the vintage schlep—selling out week after week, with no future of taking a vacation in sight.

  Six months after launching the website, Christina and I attended our first trade show in Las Vegas. No one had heard of us, and we had never done this before. I approached Jeffrey Campbell’s booth, knowing he was a brand we wanted to work with. I was instantly told no. One thing you should know about me is when I hear no, I rarely listen. It takes a special kind of stubbornness to succeed as an entrepreneur. And anyway, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. I marched back, opened up my smartphone, and showed Jeffrey what he was missing out on nastygalvintage.com. Soon after, we were Jeffrey Campbell’s newest online store and to this day we are one of his biggest customers. I also approached Sam Edelman, and when they were resistant, showed them the website and promised that we would make their brand cool. We did, and soon after we had sold $75,000 worth of their Zoe boot.

  We started slowly. We purchased some stuff from a brand called Rojas; I remember it distinctly. Our first delivery was a red-and-black plaid trapeze dress with a shirt collar and button-down front. I shot it on Nida, my five-foot-nine Thai dream girl of a model who had been the star of the eBay store. A New Orleans refugee, she was a mere sixteen when she began modeling for me (I found her on MySpace, naturally), eventually graduating from high school while continuing to be paid in hamburgers and $20 bills. The dress sold out, and we reordered it.

  We started buying units of six, testing the waters to see what sold and what didn’t. If it sold, we learned. If it didn’t sell, we learned. And we kept on learning. Six units became twelve, twelve became twenty-four, and our once exclusively vintage business became an online destination where the coolest girls could find not only vintage, but small designers at good prices, styled in a way no one had seen before. Nasty Gal was our customers’ best-kept secret, but word got out—and on we grew. Sometimes Christina and I got confused and asked each other if an item had been tak
en down because it had suddenly disappeared from the site. On these occasions we spent a few minutes trying to figure out the system glitch before we finally realized that it had sold out almost immediately.

  Though these terms are all too familiar to me now, I didn’t know back then what “market research” or “direct to consumer” meant, or even that my customers constituted a “demographic.” I just knew that talking to the girls who bought from me was important and always had been. When MySpace began its descent toward becoming a Justin Timberlake pet project, I, along with my customers, migrated to other social networks and kept the 24/7 conversation going. I thrived on it. My customers told me what they wanted, and I always knew that if I listened to them, we’d both do okay. We did better than okay, though. Together we were fucking amazing.

  A year after moving into the shipyard, Nasty Gal had already outgrown the space. The company moved to Gilman Street, in Berkeley, a block from the legendary punk club, into a storefront next to a piano store. Our one thousand square feet had become seventeen hundred square feet and we had our own parking. Score! Here, we hired our first team: someone to ship orders and someone to write product descriptions. I called up my old friend Paul, hoping he’d join part-time as our first photographer in our storefront-cum-warehouse. Paul, always up for an adventure, accepted.

  After Paul came Stacey, my friend of several years who was then moonlighting at the Christian Dior boutique in San Francisco. She had impeccable taste and an iconic look: a rail-thin beauty with a mane of dark hair pouring over steep cheekbones. I trained Stacey in the styling tips and tricks of Nasty Gal, and it didn’t hurt that she had once been a makeup artist for Chanel. She, along with our intern, Nick, brushed, blushed, buttoned, zipped, glossed, and dusted away; I focused on buying, social media, and running the business; Christina managed our small team. While many people would be happy with a manageable small business, there was nothing manageable about this. It was growing by the minute, it seemed, and we were constantly in need of more everything—people, inventory, and space, for starters.

  Our first logo and my first business card.

  In eight short months we had outgrown our Berkeley storefront. We needed a proper warehouse, and I found one in the neighboring city of Emeryville, the famous home of Pixar. I had never thought I’d ever be taking on a seventy-five-hundred-square-foot space. I’d never worked in a warehouse and I had never negotiated such a hefty lease. I was both excited and terrified, and knew I needed more help than I currently had. The “champagne problem” of selling out of vintage faster than we could keep up with had begun happening with our designer stuff as well, which had by this point surpassed vintage in sales volume. We were growing 700 percent over the prior year, which is almost unheard of in retail. Customer e-mails came in faster than we could respond to them. Orders were packed with feverish delight, and my trusty ’87 Volvo and I were schlepping to Los Angeles weekly to buy, buy, buy up a storm.

  I had begun working with a consultant, Dana Fried, who (surprise!) I found online. He’d been the COO and CFO at Taryn Rose shoes, and had a lot of experience in running companies. Dana and I decided that I needed someone to run the guts of the business: fulfillment, finance, and human resources. We wrote a job description for a director of operations, but what I ended up getting was someone who was much more than that; we got someone who would help shape the future of Nasty Gal.

  Typically, people with Frank’s experience don’t apply for jobs. I was shocked to receive a résumé from someone who had twenty years of experience in operations at Lands’ End and had been COO of Nordstrom’s online and catalog business. But Frank knew that Nasty Gal was on a tear, and also knew that type of fun is hard to come by. Frank had a lot of solutions. He told me about this thing called an “org chart,” a tool companies use to map out the structure and hierarchy of their teams. Then, he told me about “departments.” It was like we were inventing the wheel! First came a director of human resources. Then a controller. After that, a customer care manager, an inventory planner, and a manager of fulfillment. We got an IT guy. We got assistant buyers, and I got an assistant. We split up shipping and receiving, and created a returns department. Cody joined the team full time and became our e-commerce manager. We turned on the phones for the first time and had multiple lines and headsets—so official! No longer did our customers have to e-mail to reach us—they could just call! You are welcome, customers!

  As we plotted and strategized, I was a sponge, soaking it all up. As the business grew, I grew, and the ambiguity that once terrified me became something I thrived on. I was still ADD, but found that running my own company meant that every single day, if not every hour, there was some sort of new challenge to tackle, a new problem to solve, and there was no time to linger on anything, let alone get bored. We hit our first $100,000 day, and I decided to celebrate: I rented a giant, horse-shaped bounce house and had it blown up in the warehouse. Send a few e-mails, bounce bounce bounce. Ship a few orders, bounce bounce bounce . . . It was pretty much the best day ever.

  To everyone’s surprise but mine, we outgrew our Emeryville warehouse in just one short year. By this time, I was getting used to the growth. It didn’t make it any easier, but I could at least see around the corner, even if just a little. I stopped listening to the folks with experience—even Dana—because even they hadn’t seen the magnitude of growth we were experiencing. In the fall of 2010, I once again started the search for more space. I was growing weary of my monthly and sometimes weekly trips to LA, where I crashed on my friend Kate’s couch so much that I started to worry about wearing out my welcome. Nearly every showroom and designer we worked with was down there, and I was flying in to cast models we then flew up to shoot with us. I knew that I wanted to design and manufacture our own products, and that the Bay Area was a wasteland of creative talent who were just not right for us. With such conservative brands as Gap, Macy’s, and Banana Republic as our neighbors, hiring was nearly impossible. For these reasons, I made the decision to move the company to Los Angeles.

  Two months later, that is exactly what I did. I asked thirteen team members if they would relocate, and all but one said yes. Three and a half years later, they’re almost all still here in LA, growing along with me and about three hundred and fifty others.

  PORTRAIT OF A #GIRLBOSS:

  Christina Ferrucci, Buying Director at Nasty Gal

  I put myself through college working at a store in San Francisco and it was there that I realized I had a knack for curating clothing. After I graduated, I thought about fashion blogging among other things and came across a Craigslist post for an assistant at a place called Nasty Gal. I’d never heard of the brand and at the time my wardrobe was composed of daily deals from the Haight Street Goodwill, but I liked that it was vintage clothing and it spoke to me in a way that was unfamiliar but authentic. At the time I was beyond broke and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do, and it seemed like being an assistant was temporary and I could leave at any time. Five years later I’m still here. I didn’t set out on a charted career path; I chose to follow what I’m good at and what interests me.

  At the beginning Nasty Gal was a one-woman show operating out of a small studio space. It was overwhelming to watch Sophia bounce from being behind the camera to styling a pair of pants to creating the graphics for an e-mail, but her energy was contagious. Sophia was very connected with the customers and held herself to a high standard to keep them engaged and satisfied. She put a lot of pressure on herself, and so I did, too. After a few weeks at Nasty Gal I was part of what quickly became a two-woman show.

  Sophia and I learned about the business as we went along, most of which was through trial and error. If a style worked really well, we took note and tried to replicate that success. If a style was bad, it was dead to us. Pretty simple guidelines, but keeping it simple has always been part of the Nasty Gal DNA. Walking through our first trade show and saying the name Nasty
Gal was an unforgettable experience and a life lesson in the power of persistence. We always said the name at least twice, because everyone asked us to repeat it. Then a vague smile or a bad joke would be followed up with Sophia’s getting on her smartphone and showing them that it was a real website and it was cute. We made a lot of mistakes at that trade show about what we thought the customer wanted and what was right for the brand. Ultimately, we learned more than we would have if we hadn’t taken those risks, and to this day I instill those takeaways in our buying team. I’ve learned to make really quick decisions that shape the future in a positive way. One talent that I bring to the table is my ability to insult the clothing. For example, “the colors of those pants look like hospital scrubs” or “the shape of that dress is for a toddler.” This ability has served me well and has probably saved the customer from some questionable choices. Looking at the product is still my favorite part. I want to be part of creating the best shopping experience for our customer and I feel that Nasty Gal has the ability to do that better than anyone’s ever done before.

  Being a part of Nasty Gal’s success has been surprising, exciting, and completely insane at times. As the first employee, I’ve worn many different hats (most at the same time). From being an assistant to going over HR benefits with new hires to being a buyer, customer care rep, or a manager to a shipping department full of dudes—you name it, I’ve done it. Now, as the buying director, I can say this has been a strange but rewarding career. When I applied for that Craigslist ad I stumbled on something that comes across once in a lifetime. It was meant to be.