A few years back, our warehouse manager gave his two weeks’ notice exactly two weeks before Black Friday. On Thanksgiving night, our creative director, merchandisers, girls from the buying team, me, and whomever else we were able to round up headed down there and shuffled around a dusty warehouse until 4:00 A.M., scanning and reclassifying all of our inventory so we could ensure that the people who shopped with us on one of the most important retail days of the year actually got the clothes that they ordered. At 2:00 A.M., as I was counting and recounting bustiers, I did not give a shit whether people were creative or whether they loved fashion—I was just thankful to have employees who were willing, even enthusiastic, to step up and work hard.
In an ideal world you’d never have to do things that are below your position, but this isn’t an ideal world and it’s never going to be. You have to understand that even a creative job isn’t just about being creative, but about doing the work that needs to get done. The #GIRLBOSS who is willing to do a job that is below her—and above—is the one who stands out. Above, you ask? Yes. Sometimes you’ll find an opportunity to step in when your boss is out, or just swamped, and show your worth. You’re as smart as she is, anyway, so figure it out as you go and make it look like child’s play. It’s that attitude, and behavior, that will get you ahead.
God—and a Promotion—Is in the Details
Be a nice person at work. It doesn’t matter how talented you are; if you are a total terror to work with, no one will want to keep you around. And the worst kind of mean is selective mean—people who are nice to their boss and superiors, but completely rude to their peers or subordinates. If you are a habitual bitch to the front desk girl, the security guard, or even the Starbucks staff downstairs, that news will eventually make its way up the chain, and the top of the chain ain’t gonna like it.
Own up to your mistakes and apologize for them. Everyone will make a mistake at some point, and the sooner you can admit where you went wrong, the sooner you can start to fix it. Be honest with yourself about yourself and your abilities. Many people accept titles that are beyond their experience to only later find themselves up to their neck in problems they can’t solve, and too embarrassed to admit they weren’t qualified in the first place. And what’s the first rule about holes? If you’re in one, stop digging.
Boundaries, Found
Your boss is not your friend and if you’re the boss, your employees aren’t your friends. I learned this the hard way when I was out to dinner one night with someone who used to report to me. It was right after I bought the Porsche, and I was babbling on about how flashy it was, and how much of a cheese ball I sometimes felt like driving it. However, instead of listening as a friend, she took this honesty about my insecurities as an opportunity to insult, and said, “Well, you know, you’d better be careful, because people are saying ‘Oh, now I’m doing my job to pay for a Porsche.’” While I still don’t believe anyone but the person I was with had an issue with my auto purchase, it quickly had me bawling into my rosé. Yet it taught me a lesson: While it’s okay to be friends with my investor, it’s not okay to be friends with my direct reports. If you need someone to listen as you drag your psyche across the coals, find a friend or a therapist, but don’t do it with someone you’re expected to manage on a daily basis.
At a company like Nasty Gal, which seems very informal and where there are a lot of young people, the managerial lines can sometimes get blurry. If you treat your reports like your peers, your team won’t respect you further down the road when you have to play a trump card or put your foot down. I’ll go for drinks with people, I’ll dance at parties, but at the end of the day people know that when I give someone a deadline, it’s not up for discussion.
You Are Not a Special Snowflake
Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance.
—Joel Stein in Time magazine
From one speed demon to another, let me be straight with you: Slow your roll. You got a job, that’s great, but you need to get your hands dirty and spend time proving yourself before you ask for a raise or a promotion. Four months are not enough, and neither are eight. At the bare minimum, you need to be in your position for a year before you ask for a raise or title change. Even then, that’s if and only if you’ve been going above and beyond, doing work that’s outside your job description, and generally making yourself completely indispensable to your employer.
A lot of people in my generation don’t seem to get that you have to work your way up. An entry level job is precisely that—entry level—which means that you’re not going to be running the show or getting to work on the most fun and creative projects. I’ve heard so many people in their twenties complain about their jobs because they “have so much more to offer,” but first and foremost, you have to do the job that you’re there to do. I don’t care if filing invoices is beneath you. If you don’t do it, who do you think is going to? Your boss? Nope. That’s why she hired you.
I know you’ve probably grown up with your parents telling you that you’re special every day for the past twenty years—it’s okay, my parents did too—but you still have to show up and work hard just like everybody else. If you’re a #GIRLBOSS, you should want to work harder than everybody else.
It takes a lot more than just knowing how to put an outfit together to succeed in the fashion industry, so more power to you if this is where you want to be; just don’t expect it to be an extended trip to the mall. And if you’re a cute girl expecting to just get by on her looks, go apply elsewhere. We’ve already got a ton of cute girls working at Nasty Gal, and they’re all busting ass.
The Firing Line
There is no way around it, and it doesn’t matter which side of the desk you’re on: Getting fired straight-up sucks. One of the many jobs I was fired from was a sales associate job at a luxury shoe store in San Francisco. I was a crummy twenty-one-year-old—not as dirty as I had been, but still not completely clean—hawking shoes by Maison Martin Margiela, Miu Miu, and Dries van Noten with quadruple-digit price tags. At that time I stayed out all night and showed up to work semi-showered, wearing the same red polyester flares day after day as I sold Prada pumps to rich ladies. I didn’t care about Prada and I didn’t get that I was supposed to pretend. As I write this, I am in love with a particular pair of Prada shoes that I am considering buying, so oh how times have changed, but back then I was indignant about it—“Who is spending this kind of money on shoes?”
I made $12 an hour with no commission as these women from Pacific Heights (a pretty chichi neighborhood in San Francisco) would come in and I would have to smile and be all like “Hiiiiiiiiiii, how are youuuuuu? Let me know if there’s anything I can help you withhhh,” while inside I was thinking, I hate you. The store made the salespeople wear the shoes too, so I had a pair of Dries van Noten pumps that were so scuffed they could have been vintage. They weren’t special to me, so I wore them to work and burrito shops alike. On Sundays I worked by myself, and was given thirty minutes to close the store for my lunch break. Time came, I flipped the sign on the door, locked up, and walked down the street to order a hamburger. The burger took forever and I was hungry. This, coupled with my pathetic sense of time, caused me to be super late to open the store back up. When you make $12 an hour and you’re spending $8 on a burger, you had damn well better make it count.