If I, and this book, have anything to prove, it’s that when you believe in yourself, other people will believe in you, too.
“With my touch, a plus-size anorak became Comme Des Garçons and ski pants Balenciaga.”
2
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
If 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.