#GIRLBOSS ( PDFDrive )

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