A few weeks later, though, Mother Maria called me. The old priest had died and she wanted me to photograph his funeral. When I arrived his body was near the altar in a simple casket handmade from a few pieces of wood with a white satin sheet stapled to the interior. Aside from me there were about eight other people in attendance. So many of the worlds that I had dipped into played at shrugging off modern society, but the priest was a man who had truly rejected it. In a city full of noise, he’d found light by living in the shadows. Holy shit, is that heavy.
My baptism by fire helped me to find comfort in many different environments. I photographed truckers, bartenders, and outsiders in Nowheresville. I had begun to feel like I really knew what I was doing with a camera. And I’d upgraded to my twenty-first-birthday gift, a Hasselblad medium-format camera. That camera, to this day, is the best gift I’ve ever been given. It was my mother’s last effort to help me find my way. I decided that I wanted to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. In order to do so, I needed to have a finished photography portfolio.
In order to fulfill this prerequisite, I chose to return to the church. Mother Maria introduced me to a priest, Brother Eugene, who lived on a small plot of land outside Santa Rosa, selling his vegetables at the farmers market on weekends. I spent the day with him and we talked about everything under the sun. He fed me trailermade borscht and I went on my way. I then set off to a Russian Orthodox monastery in Point Reyes.
The monastery was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. There was a shipping container where a young monk spent his days dipping beeswax candles to be used in churches and sold in gift shops. Some men built caskets. Some gardened. They were shut off from the world but they were open enough to let me in. I couldn’t help but think that when they weren’t wearing robes, I could have mistaken these guys for metalheads.
In the end I decided that I couldn’t stomach the $50,000-a-year tuition and chose to forgo art school. But my series, which I called Armed to Bless, was an education in itself: It was one of the first times that I had ever finished something that I set out to do.
Find Your Framework
Applying to SFAI gave me the framework to be free within a set of rules in a way that school and jobs had not allowed me. Armed to Bless was an accomplishment beyond just taking pictures. It taught me that when I do things because I want to do them, and not because I have to, I can accomplish a lot. This type of framework is all around us and it also exists outside applying to or attending school. When it came to starting my own business, I found the framework that I needed on eBay. I probably could not have built a website of my own at that point, but my ambition grew with each crack of opportunity. The framework of eBay presented me with a series of easy-to-complete tasks (take photo, upload photo, write description) that eventually added up to a business. Starting it was as easy as picking a name and uploading the first auction. That instant gratification would never have come had my first step been to write a business plan. And without that instant gratification I might not have kept going. If you’re dreaming big, #GIRLBOSS, don’t be discouraged if you have to start small. It worked for me.
Putting the “Art” in Sandwich Artist
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
—Leo Burnett
Anything you do can be creative. If, when you make a smoothie, you try to make the best smoothie the world has ever tasted, it’s a creative act. If you throw a frozen banana and some yogurt in a blender and hit puree, well, not only is it uncreative and boring, but I also feel really bad for you.
I was always looking for ways to make my job creative, no matter what that job was. At Subway I loved the giant spray nozzle that hung above the dishwashing sink. Blasting mayo off of the spatula was uniquely satisfying. I liked making bread, spacing out the little twisted sticks of dough into perfect patterns on trays before sliding them into the oven. I learned the secret to the perfect doughy center in Subway’s cookies: slamming the tray down on the counter, causing the cookies to spread out while the pan was still hot. And any job that pays you for slamming things . . . well, consider yourself lucky.
None of the jobs at Nasty Gal are shitty to me, and I know because at some point I’ve done almost all of them. Whether it was styling, directing models, steaming clothing, or shipping an order—they were all creative. And when something got really boring, I turned it into a game to see how quickly, efficiently, and accurately I could get the job done.
The Venn Diagram of Creativity and Business
Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steelmaking.
—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
I would never have accomplished what I have had I felt forced to choose between my creative talent and my business acumen. At Nasty Gal, I’m the CEO and creative director, two titles that are rarely on the same business card—but what no one seems to talk about is that business is creative. I’m as creative when I’m choosing an investor as when I’m reviewing collection samples. I have as much fun hiring people as I did with a camera in my hand.
Keeping the Nasty Gal brand consistent as we have grown has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced. I’ve gone from being a solo artist to one part of a killer band. Our C-level team is the rhythm section, the rest of the team is playing guitar and keys, and I’m just scatting. Be-bop a doo-wa . . .
It wasn’t too long after I’d launched the eBay store that I started to recognize how important the thumbnail photos were. Thumbnail photos are prime real estate in e-commerce—they hook your customers in while simultaneously informing them about what they’re looking at. These thumbnails can’t be too messy or too bland. They must display the items clearly so that as prospective customers zoom quickly through the catalog page, they know what they’re looking at and also find it interesting. I saw that when the shape and style of an item was clearly visible in even the tiniest photo, it inevitably went for a higher price than a thumbnail where the silhouette was obscured or confusing to look at.
To this day I blur my eyes when I edit photos. I load all my photos on Bridge, shrink them down super-small, then cross my eyes like a goofball and flag the images that still catch my eye. This allows me to edit quickly without getting distracted by the details—if the composition or silhouette sucks, it doesn’t matter what the model’s face says. The DNA of a successful image, and brand, must be encrypted into its tiniest representation while gracefully telling the same story in its largest incarnation. My thumbnail photos were the postage stamps to Nasty Gal’s success.
I was used to making dozens of little creative decisions every day, but designing the first Nasty Gal website was my first macro “branding” project. Though once again, I didn’t see it as a branding project—Nasty Gal just needed a website, so I made one. I had no formal graphic design training, but knew what I liked and what I didn’t, and had spent so much time observing and talking to my customers—through eBay and MySpace—that I was confident I knew what would appeal to them.
Block type was really big in 2008, so I found some clunky font on a German graphic designer’s blog and downloaded it for free. I smashed the letters together, making one solid shape, and the first Nasty Gal logo was created. I went through a million iterations of the site, but it was always a fairly simple design. The color scheme was always pink, black, and gray because I didn’t want it to be too heavy. I used a close-up shot of my friend Dee’s face in the navigation (Dee was an early eBay model and now works for Nasty Gal as an apparel designer) and it was up there for years. The main tenets of the navigation were “Shop New” and “Shop Vintage.” It’s not as if I invented the English language here, but Nasty Gal was definitely one of the first websites to sell both new and vintage and position it as such.