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How I Became a #GIRLBOSS

The Early Days: Hernias, Haggling, and the Sad Bunny

So you’ve decided to step up to the plate and start an eBay business. You should first decide how much time you have to devote. I suggest you don’t quit your day job (yet).

—Starting an eBay Business For Dummies If I’m being totally honest here—and that’s what I’m being here, totally honest—Nasty Gal started because I had a hernia. I was living in San Francisco, jobless, when I suddenly discovered that I had a hernia in my groin. I wore a lot of supertight pants at the time, and the hernia was visible even when I had clothes on, with a little bump sticking out like “boop.” One time I even shaved off all my pubic hair, except for the hair that covered the bump. Clearly, I did not give a fuck. But all joking aside, I knew that the hernia was a medical condition that required treatment, and that to get treatment I would need health insurance. To get health insurance, I would need a job. A real one.

Where it all began: An art school lobby, a UFO haircut, and an Internet connection.

I found one checking IDs in the lobby of an art school and started to put in the ninety days that were required as a waiting period before the job’s benefits kicked in. As you can probably imagine, checking IDs wasn’t the most stimulating job, so I had a lot of time to fuck around on the Internet. MySpace ruled in those days (I went by the username WIGWAM). At some point I started to notice that I was getting a lot of friend requests from eBay sellers aiming to promote their vintage stores to young girls like me.

After ninety days, I got health insurance, got my hernia fixed, and got the hell out of there. During my recovery period, I moved out of my place, and to both my and my mother’s dismay, spent a month living at home. I had no income and no plan. But boy, did I have time. I remembered the friend requests I had accumulated from vintage sellers and thought, Hell, I can do that! I had the photography experience. I had cute friends to model. I wore exclusively vintage and knew the ropes. And I was an expert scavenger.

The first thing I did was buy a book: Starting an eBay Business For Dummies, which taught me how to set up my store. The first order of business was to choose a name. Many of the vintage shops already on eBay were so bohemian it hurt, with names like Lady in the Tall Grass Vintage or Spirit Moon Raven Sister Vintage. So the contrarian in me grabbed the keyboard and named my shop-to-be Nasty Gal Vintage, inspired by my favorite album by legendary funk singer and wild woman Betty Davis.

She’s probably most well known because she was Miles Davis’s ex-wife, but it was her music (she had perhaps the best rhythm section around), her unapologetically sexy attitude, and her outspoken tongue that made me a fan. Performing in lingerie and fishnet stockings, her signature move being a high kick in the air with feet encased in platform shoes, she was the ultimate #GIRLBOSS. She had songs called “Your Mama Wants You Back,” “Don’t Call Her No Tramp,” and “They Say I’m Different.” She wrote her own music and lyrics and produced her own songs, which was almost unheard of for a female musician in the ’70s. As mind-blowing as Betty Davis was, she was just too far ahead of her time to ever meet with mainstream success. I thought I was just picking a name for an eBay store, but it turned out that I was actually infusing the entire brand with not only my spirit, but the spirit of this incredible woman.

By the time I opened up the shop, vintage had long been a part of my life. I’ve always had a penchant for old things and the stories they tell. My grandfather ran a motel in West Sacramento, and my dad was one of seven kids who grew up maintaining the place. When I was a little kid, we went back to visit, and there was a junk room full of magic—an old Ouija board, ’70s T-shirts with cap sleeves and crazy iron-on graphics, my aunt’s old coin collection. It was just stuff that kids growing up in the ’60s and ’70s left behind, but I found it fascinating.

As a teenager, I preferred thrifted clothing to new, a preference that totally perplexed my mother. She endured countless trips to the local mall in a futile attempt to dress me, where I’d hold up a $50 top and inform her that it just “wasn’t worth it.” Were there a Nasty Gal at the time, I think I’d have found plenty of stuff for my mom to spend her money on, but the mall was a boring place. The smattering of stores screaming “normal” from their windows just did not cut it for me, and the thought of paying to look like everyone else seemed utterly ridiculous. Finally, we reached a compromise. Although she deemed thrift stores “smelly,” she agreed to wait outside while I shopped. However, this didn’t mean she always approved of my choices. I distinctly remember being humiliated in front of a friend when she demanded that I go back upstairs to change my shirt—not because she thought it was revealing or inappropriate in any way, but because she thought that my brown paisley polyester blouse was just plain ugly.

Creep in polyester on creep in polyester.

By the time I was in my twenties, vintage was almost all I wore. In San Francisco my friends and I picked a decade and stuck with it. We listened to old music, drove old cars, and wore old clothes. My decade was the ’70s. I had long rock ’n’ roll hair parted in the middle, with a uniform of my new eBay high-waisted polyester pants, platform shoes, and vintage halters.

With the new store I took thrifting to a whole new level. On Craigslist I found a theater company that was going out of business and negotiated a great deal for a carload of vintage. I threw some of my own pieces into that lot of wool capes and Gunne Sax dresses, and suddenly I had merchandise. I went to Target and bought some Rubbermaid containers, clothespins, a steamer, and a clothing rack, and got to work on my first round of auctions. I enlisted my mom, forming a primitive assembly line: I’d call out a garment’s measurements, and my mom would write it down on a little scrap of paper and pin it onto the garment.

My first model was Emily, a gorgeous girl and my friend’s girlfriend at the time. Covered in tattoos, with long hair and adorable bangs, she was an unusual choice—but she was a great one. I shot maybe ten of the items I’d accumulated, then plunked the description, measurements, and other information into eBay and waited out my ten-day auctions, answering the oh-so-exciting questions from my very first customers along the way. Each week I grew faster, smarter, and more aware of what women wanted. And each week my auctions did better and better. If it sold, cool—I’d instantly go find more things like it. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t touch anything like it with a ten-foot pole ever again. Shocking, but cute girls apparently do not want to wear “drug rugs,” the beach-bum sweatshirts that some prefer to call baja hoodies. It was addicting; for an adrenaline freak like me, there was nothing like the instant gratification of watching my auctions go live.

I scoured Craigslist for estate sales, and then made a map, starting with whichever one sounded like the people who died were the oldest. I would show up at 6:00 A.M. and stand in line with people who were all at least twenty years my senior. When the doors opened, everyone else started putzing around for doilies, while I bolted straight for the closet to unearth vintage coats, mod minidresses, Halston-era disco gowns, and many a Golden Girls tracksuit. I’d hoard, haggle, pay, and leave. Also a regular at the local thrift stores, I waited for the employees to wheel shopping carts of freshly priced merchandise out from the back, and when they took an armload to hang up on the racks . . . pounce! I’d run over and check out what mysteries awaited. Once, I found two Chanel jackets in the same shopping cart. Flip, flip, flip—Chanel jacket—flip, flip, flip—another one! I paid $8 for each of those Chanel jackets. I listed each of them at a $9.99 starting bid and sold them for over $1,500. I didn’t know what a “gross margin” was, but I knew I was on to something.

In retrospect I was probably the worst customer at the thrift store because not only was I sneaky, but I also haggled. “This sweater has a hole in it,” I’d say after marching up to the counter. “Can I get ten percent off?” Even if it was only a matter of fifty cents, it was worth it to me. Every cent counted.

At age twenty-two, I returned to the suburbs, a place I had run screaming from just four years earlier. Space was at a premium in San Francisco, so I set up shop in Pleasant Hill, California, an hour away from my friends. I stayed in a pool house with no kitchen—I paid $500 a month and filled the place to the brim with vintage. I worked from my bed, which was covered with clothes and surrounded by packing materials. There was shit on top of shit: boxes balanced on top of a toaster oven on top of a mini-fridge like a game of household-object Jenga.

Every day, my topknot and I would drive to Starbucks and order a Venti Soy No Water No Foam Chai. Depending on the weather, it was either iced or hot, but there was about a five-year period where I drank at least one of these every single day. For food, I’d throw on a musty sweater with a $4.99 tag stapled to the front of it, forget that that was a weird thing to do, and go to Burger Road, my favorite place in town. I never thought much about the fact that I was spending $100 a month on Starbucks, or that I was missing out on anything by being so far removed from my life in the city. I was addicted to my business, and to watching it grow every day.

When I wasn’t out sourcing new merchandise, I was at home, adding friends on MySpace. My outfit of choice was born out of my newfound lifestyle, devoid of any necessity to shower, get dressed, or look good. The Sad Bunny, as Gary, my boyfriend at the time called it, was a big, fluffy “mom” bathrobe that hung down to the floor. I sometimes topped it off with a pink towel on my head if I’d gotten the itch to shower that day—so if you’re one of the sixty thousand girls I added as a MySpace friend back then, I’m sorry. Nasty Gal Vintage was run by a workaholic mutant dressed like the Easter Bunny.

I had friend-adding software, which was totally against MySpace’s policy. I would look up, say, an it girl’s friends and add only girls between certain ages in certain cities. Every ten new friends, I had to enter the CAPTCHA code to prove I was a real person and not a spamming computer. I was actually a little guilty of being both. When I’d exhausted one magazine, musician, brand, or it girl, I’d go on to another. The Sad Bunny and I were in the zone, entering CAPTCHA codes and watching our friend count rise as girls accepted. Soon I had tens of thousands of friends on MySpace, which I used to drive people to the eBay store. I did a MySpace bulletin and blog post for every single auction that went up on Nasty Gal Vintage. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing here included two keys to running a successful business: knowing your customer and knowing how to get free marketing.

I also responded to every single comment that anyone left on my page. It just seemed like the polite thing to do. Many companies were spending millions of dollars trying to nail social media, but I just went with my instincts and treated my customers like they were my friends. Even with no manager watching to give me a gold star, it was important to do my best. Who cares if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it? The tree still falls. If you believe that what you’re doing will have positive results, it will—even if it’s not immediately obvious. When you hold yourself to the same standard in your work that you do as a friend, girlfriend, student, or otherwise, it pays off.

Every week, one full day was spent shooting in the driveway, with the garage’s blue door as my backdrop. The night before was spent selecting an interesting mix of vintage, ensuring that no two similar items were listed at the same time. This way, my items weren’t competing against one another, and I was able to maximize the potential of each. The models were cast via MySpace, and I paid them with a post-shoot trip to Burger Road. As I was not only the stylist, but the photographer as well, I developed a special talent for buttoning garments with one hand while holding my camera in the other.

When paying models with hamburgers didn’t work, I’d get in front of the camera myself.

I styled the models like real girls who had stepped right into a fashion editorial shoot. With my touch, a plus-size anorak became Comme des Garçons, and ski pants became Balenciaga. Silhouette was always the most important element in my photos. It was critical on eBay, because that was what stood out when potential customers were zooming through thumbnails, giving less than a microsecond’s thought to each item. But the more attention I paid to fashion photography, the more I realized that silhouette is what makes anything successful. If the silhouette is flattering, it doesn’t matter if the person wearing it doesn’t have runway model proportions.

I remember perusing a vintage store in San Francisco when the girl working there confessed to me that to get outfit inspiration before going out on Fridays, she visited Nasty Gal Vintage. I started to realize that, though I’d never intended to do so, I was providing my customers with a styling service. Because I was styling every piece of clothing I was selling head to toe, from the hair down to the shoes, I was showing girls how to style themselves. And though you’ll rarely hear me advocate giving anything away for free, this realization was one of the most profound and welcome ones I’ve had with the business. I always knew that Nasty Gal Vintage was about more than just selling stuff, but this proved it: What we were really doing was helping girls to look and feel awesome before they left the house.

The first time I wanted to play stylist, ceding control to another photographer, I made a friend for life in the process. When I came across Paul Trapani’s website, he was already a successful freelance photographer shooting editorials for magazines. I figured it was a long shot, but his number was listed on his website, so I called him up. I was shocked when he answered and had actually heard of Nasty Gal Vintage—at this point, I was just a girl in a room with a few dozen crazed customers, hardly anything I’d expect someone like Paul to have heard of. What was more, he was willing to work for trade, using the shots for his portfolio if I booked the models, found the location, and styled everything to perfection.

Though I had a devoted eBay following and my auctions were starting to close at higher and higher prices, Nasty Gal Vintage was still a pretty small-beans operation. However, if the offer of a free hamburger wasn’t enough to sway a potential model, the promise of a fun afternoon (and some shots of her looking gorgeous) usually was. I recruited Lisa, a beautiful five-foot-five brunette with doe eyes and pouty lips, to model, and we headed up to Port Costa. Port Costa is a remote little town in the East Bay that if one didn’t know better, could seem like it was solely occupied by Hell’s Angels. There’s a bar called the Warehouse with four hundred beers and a stuffed polar bear, a motel, and that’s about it. The motel was an old converted brothel, each room named after a working girl, like the Bertha Room or the Edna Room, and this was where we shot. The backdrop was a mix of awesome antique floral wallpaper and dumpy sofas from the ’80s, and the light was hard, on-camera flash softened by the hazy sun filtering in through the window. I even made a cameo as a model in a couple of the shots, and we had a total blast.

Many people assume that working from home is like a vacation, where you get to do what you want when you want. This was not the case for me. The demands of eBay put me on the strictest schedule I’d ever endured. Because my auctions were timed, there were very real consequences for missing deadlines. The prime time for auctions to go live was Sunday evening. If mine went up late, that meant my customers, who were likely waiting to pounce on my latest batch of vintage gems, might end up disappointed, instead giving another seller their business. If I took too long to respond to a customer inquiry, she might get impatient, choosing to bid on something else. Shipping orders out late might result in negative feedback, and if I didn’t steam and prep all the clothes the night before a shoot, there wouldn’t be time to get through everything in one day.

A photo Paul took of Lisa and me at our first Nasty Gal shoot in Port Costa in 2007.

After everything was shot, I became a machine. I spent an entire day editing photos. An amateur Photoshop user, I blurred out zits and cropped photos as fast as possible. I devised systems to increase my efficiency whenever and wherever. I uploaded all my photos to an FTP and used a template for my listings. My fingers were a carpal-tunnel whirlwind, typing out primitive HTML in equal form to a twelve-year-old hacker. When I wrote product descriptions, I exalted the details. I included styling tips in the copy, in case someone was considering bidding on a Betty White–type windbreaker but wasn’t quite sure how to pull it off like MIA could. I included all of the details: shoulder-to-shoulder measurements, armpit to armpit, waist, hips, length. . . . I noted every flaw, and was always totally honest about the condition of everything.

Auction titles on eBay are more of a science than an art. Every auction title started with “VTG,” for vintage, and then the rest was a word-salad mix of search terms and actual descriptions. “Babydoll” and “Peter Pan” were really big in 2007, with “hippie” and “boho” making an appearance now and again, then this eventually evolved into “architectural” and “avant-garde.” To be honest, I’m glad I’ve forgotten most of these words and the taxonomy I used to arrange them. In those days I ate, slept, drank, and dreamt search terms. I’d wake up, the sheets and blankets a sweaty, tangled mess around me, practically shouting “’80s Sequined Cocktail Dress!” into the dark.

I loved shipping stuff. I got as OCD on the USPS as I did on the Subway BLT. I was a one-girl assembly line. I had a Rubbermaid bin to my right, a Rubbermaid bin to my left, and all of my shipping paraphernalia on my desk.

The bin to my right had all of the vintage items that had just sold and needed to be shipped out. I’d grab an item and inspect it to make sure it was in good shape. I’d zip zippers, button buttons, and hook hooks, then fold it and slide it into a clear plastic bag that I sealed with a sticker. I’d print out a receipt and a Photoshop-hacked note reading “Thanks for shopping at Nasty Gal Vintage! We hope you love your new stuff as much as we do!”—even though “we” was just me. Then I’d put it in a box and slap a shipping label on. Only I didn’t slap anything—I took a lot of pride in how carefully I affixed those labels. I had to assume that my customer was as particular and as concerned with aesthetics as I was. Anyway, the last thing I wanted was for her to think it was just one girl hacking away in a room by herself. . . .

By the age of twenty-three, life felt surreal. I remember a typical buying trip to LA, drinking canned beer in a friend’s backyard. At that moment, I was watching my auctions close, totaling $2,500. I was making more in a week than I’d ever had in a month at my hourly jobs. While my mother was writing me long e-mails imploring me to return to community college, all I had to do was look at my burgeoning bank balance to think that maybe this time she had it wrong.

Sometimes there was so much demand for what I was selling that it actually became a pain in the ass. I sold a gauzy, ivory-colored drop-waist dress covered with silver and white beads, which looked like something an Olsen twin would have worn on the red carpet. For months after it sold, I received a barrage of sob stories from brides-to-be, begging and pleading with me to find them another dress identical to it. Sometimes they seemed convinced that I was holding out on them, but little did they know that I was no vintage archivist, but just a girl patiently going through every rack at the thrift store.

I took every item I sold seriously, obsessing to ensure my customers had a great experience. I took one of the Chanel jackets to the dry cleaner’s while it was up for auction, and they managed to lose one of the rare-ass buttons. That jacket was $1,000 in my pocket, so you better believe I looked in, around, and under every one of their machines to find it. No dice. I called Chanel in Beverly Hills, and the person who picked up told me to send a button to New York, where Chanel would match it from the company’s vintage archive. To do that, I had to cut another button off the jacket. Terrifying! But I did, and sent it off, where Chanel dated it 1988, matched the button, and sent them back. I had a professional sew them back on, and even though the girl who had bought it had to wait an extra week for her purchase, she was beyond stoked when she got it. I breathed a sigh of relief, and probably celebrated with a Starbucks chai.

You Can’t Sit with Us: The eBay Clique

I completely dropped out of everything for two years. From the time I woke up until the time I went to sleep, eBay was my entire world. For every category on eBay, there is a seller forum. I wouldn’t necessarily label everyone who sells goods on eBay as an entrepreneur. (Some of the women selling vintage on eBay have been peddling their 1940s aprons for a little too long.) When I came on the scene and started bidding wars over polyester dresses, these purists did nothing but complain. They were disgusted that I called pieces from the 1980s “vintage,” arguing that nothing postdating the 1960s qualified. They also made endless fun of my models: “She’s doing the bulimia pose again!” was a favorite about any photo where the model was slightly bent over, with hands on her waist in that iconic high-fashion pose.

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 taken 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. “There are secret opportunities hidden inside every failure.”