#GIRLBOSS (2 page)

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

I
f 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.