I have a friend who told me something recently that really resonated. He said that he felt like he’d “gotten off at the wrong stop,” as if there’s a bus traveling through space and time that randomly opens its doors and drops souls off to live through whatever time they’re assigned. I don’t believe we’re all fit for the time we’re assigned. It’s a weird world we live in, and until time travel exists we’ve all got to make the most of where we land.
Failure Is Your Invention
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw
I gave up a long time ago on finding anything that was 100 percent, totally “me.” I was not only open to trying on different lifestyles, I forced such experimentation upon myself—always knowing that I’d evolve past it, rarely surprised when I was ready to move on and never so attached that it hindered my growth.
Strangely, I think this attitude paid off when I started the business. From Nasty Gal’s inception, I have always viewed the business as a work in progress. I constantly tweak and move on, peeling back layers of the onion as new ones arrive. If something didn’t work—like if I put a dress up for auction and no one was bidding on it—I didn’t just assume that no one wanted it. I just tried something else. I rewrote the product description, or swapped out the thumbnail because I thought that maybe people couldn’t judge the silhouette correctly from the original picture I’d posted. I never assumed that I’d just done my best job the first time around.
Your challenge as a #GIRLBOSS is to dive headfirst into things without being too attached to the results. When your goal is to gain experience, perspective, and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility. Failure is your invention. I believe that there is a silver lining in everything, and once you begin to see it, you’ll need sunglasses to combat the glare. It is she who listens to the rest of the world who fails, and it is she who has enough confidence to define success and failure for herself who succeeds. These words were not invented for an incremental life. “Success” and “failure” serve a world that is black-and-white. And as I said before, it’s all just kinda gray. This may sound sad, or boring, but it’s actually quite empowering. It’s not the prescription that many books may suggest exists, but it allows you to self-prescribe. And to self-subscribe.
You Belong Wherever You Want to Belong
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
—Oscar Wilde
There’s a certain freedom to being an outsider. You do what you want, say what you want, and move on when you’ve worn out your welcome. In the past seven years, I’ve gone from being a nobody with no job and no insurance to someone who is seen as a leader and a role model. I was once told by a big-shot CEO that if I’m in an elevator with employees and chat with one but not the others, it signifies to everyone that the person I spoke to is more important than the others. To put it plainly, I exist under a microscope.
It’s been rough getting used to the fact that what I say matters, whether it is good or bad, and holy shit, people actually want to talk to me. When we have our all-hands meetings, I am required to stand in front of two hundred people and talk about everything that’s happening within the business while simultaneously seeming like I didn’t have a bad morning and also possess every answer to the company’s problems. I’ve asked myself, Who am I to hold all of these other people captive while I blather and make bad jokes? Oh shit, I’m the boss, that’s who. Some people become CEOs for this exact reason—because they like to be in the spotlight—but it doesn’t come naturally to me, and I don’t know that it ever will. I no longer expect anyone to throw a rotten tomato at me and yell, “Off the stage, freak!” but the whole thing is still pretty surreal.
I’ve played with a lot of different lifestyles and identities. When I was living in Olympia, I snuck into a high school prom and danced with the cutest underclassmen I could find. I dressed up like a soccer mom to steal a loaf of bread. Never in my life, though, did I ever imagine that the role that I would actually end up inhabiting was that of a CEO. I felt like a fraud for a long time, as if there were no way in hell I was qualified. Who gave this freak the keys? I thought to myself, wondering if, and when, I’d ever be found out. I refused to think of people I met through business as friends. My real friends were weirdos from San Francisco who were broke, loved obscure elf metal, and celebrated 6/6/06 with me like it was Christmas. I kept telling myself that Danny, my investor, wasn’t my friend, even though we had great conversations over dinner and I loved his wife. I thought that people like Danny couldn’t be my real friends, because they were from this pedigreed world of MBAs and real careers, whereas I was just an interloper in a Black Sabbath T-shirt.
Finally, though, I arrived at a point where I decided this was bullshit. I stopped feeling as if I didn’t belong anywhere, and realized that I belonged anywhere I wanted to be—whether that was a boardroom, business class, or on stage at a Women’s Wear Daily CEO Summit. Today, I consider Danny my peer. Sometimes I can even get him to laugh at a fart joke.
Nasty Gal has been my MBA. I’ve learned to not be shy about stopping someone in the middle of a presentation to ask him to please clarify something because I don’t know what he’s talking about. If I still don’t get it, I’ll tell him so and ask him to explain it again. Sometimes I can practically hear the eyes rolling around the room—but given that I’m making decisions that involve so much money and so many people, I can’t afford to pretend to know what’s up. When you run a company the size of mine, you’re not the only one who ends up paying for your mistakes. I could act like a CEO or I could really be a CEO, which means doing whatever I need to do (including asking obvious questions) to make the best decision for my company. No matter where you are in life, you’ll save a lot of time by not worrying too much about what other people think about you. The earlier in your life that you can learn that, the easier the rest of it will be. You is who you is, so get used to it.
On Being a Freak
I like being myself. Myself and nasty.
—Aldous Huxley
When you accept yourself, it’s surprising how much other people will accept you, too. As a company, Nasty Gal sits half in the fashion world and half in its own galaxy. I’ve never felt that more acutely than when I go to New York Fashion Week. I absolutely hate Fashion Week. It hurts me from the inside out. Let me break down Fashion Week for you, and I apologize if I am shattering your dreams of glamour and sophistication.
You are assigned a piece of bench in a too-hot or too-cold warehouse that is hard to get to because all the cabs are taken and the subway is not a choice due to your absurd-ass shoes. The piece of bench assigned to you is not even as wide as your butt, and someone is probably sitting on it. You are forced to either act like an asshole and confront that someone and tell him or her to move, or you go and put your butt down in someone else’s assigned piece of bench, at which point that person will be forced to act like an asshole and come along and tell you to move. At this point, you couldn’t care less about the clothes that you’re about to see; you wish you were back in your hotel room eating glutinous pancakes and wearing sweats.
I’m not a blogger, I’m not an editor, and my company doesn’t buy luxury brands, so even though I’ve been written about on Style.com and in such magazines as Elle, whenever I go to a fashion party I feel like Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls, when she shows up to the Halloween party in a nightgown and buck teeth while everyone else is wearing lingerie and bunny ears. All of a sudden I revert to being an insecure thirteen-year-old, wondering if I’m wearing the right brand of shoes, and are they the right season? If so, are they the right color? Barf. It’s a high school outfit contest, and I’d rather be working.