#GIRLBOSS (3 page)

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.