I scoured Craigslist for estate sales, and then made a map, starting with whichever one sounded like the people who died were the oldest. I would show up at 6:00 A.M. and stand in line with people who were all at least twenty years my senior. When the doors opened, everyone else started putzing around for doilies, while I bolted straight for the closet to unearth vintage coats, mod minidresses, Halston-era disco gowns, and many a Golden Girls tracksuit. I’d hoard, haggle, pay, and leave. Also a regular at the local thrift stores, I waited for the employees to wheel shopping carts of freshly priced merchandise out from the back, and when they took an armload to hang up on the racks . . . pounce! I’d run over and check out what mysteries awaited. Once, I found two Chanel jackets in the same shopping cart. Flip, flip, flip—Chanel jacket—flip, flip, flip—another one! I paid $8 for each of those Chanel jackets. I listed each of them at a $9.99 starting bid and sold them for over $1,500. I didn’t know what a “gross margin” was, but I knew I was on to something.
In retrospect I was probably the worst customer at the thrift store because not only was I sneaky, but I also haggled. “This sweater has a hole in it,” I’d say after marching up to the counter. “Can I get ten percent off?” Even if it was only a matter of fifty cents, it was worth it to me. Every cent counted.
At age twenty-two, I returned to the suburbs, a place I had run screaming from just four years earlier. Space was at a premium in San Francisco, so I set up shop in Pleasant Hill, California, an hour away from my friends. I stayed in a pool house with no kitchen—I paid $500 a month and filled the place to the brim with vintage. I worked from my bed, which was covered with clothes and surrounded by packing materials. There was shit on top of shit: boxes balanced on top of a toaster oven on top of a mini-fridge like a game of household-object Jenga.
Every day, my topknot and I would drive to Starbucks and order a Venti Soy No Water No Foam Chai. Depending on the weather, it was either iced or hot, but there was about a five-year period where I drank at least one of these every single day. For food, I’d throw on a musty sweater with a $4.99 tag stapled to the front of it, forget that that was a weird thing to do, and go to Burger Road, my favorite place in town. I never thought much about the fact that I was spending $100 a month on Starbucks, or that I was missing out on anything by being so far removed from my life in the city. I was addicted to my business, and to watching it grow every day.
When I wasn’t out sourcing new merchandise, I was at home, adding friends on MySpace. My outfit of choice was born out of my newfound lifestyle, devoid of any necessity to shower, get dressed, or look good. The Sad Bunny, as Gary, my boyfriend at the time called it, was a big, fluffy “mom” bathrobe that hung down to the floor. I sometimes topped it off with a pink towel on my head if I’d gotten the itch to shower that day—so if you’re one of the sixty thousand girls I added as a MySpace friend back then, I’m sorry. Nasty Gal Vintage was run by a workaholic mutant dressed like the Easter Bunny.
I had friend-adding software, which was totally against MySpace’s policy. I would look up, say, an it girl’s friends and add only girls between certain ages in certain cities. Every ten new friends, I had to enter the CAPTCHA code to prove I was a real person and not a spamming computer. I was actually a little guilty of being both. When I’d exhausted one magazine, musician, brand, or it girl, I’d go on to another. The Sad Bunny and I were in the zone, entering CAPTCHA codes and watching our friend count rise as girls accepted. Soon I had tens of thousands of friends on MySpace, which I used to drive people to the eBay store. I did a MySpace bulletin and blog post for every single auction that went up on Nasty Gal Vintage. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing here included two keys to running a successful business: knowing your customer and knowing how to get free marketing.
I also responded to every single comment that anyone left on my page. It just seemed like the polite thing to do. Many companies were spending millions of dollars trying to nail social media, but I just went with my instincts and treated my customers like they were my friends. Even with no manager watching to give me a gold star, it was important to do my best. Who cares if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it? The tree still falls. If you believe that what you’re doing will have positive results, it will—even if it’s not immediately obvious. When you hold yourself to the same standard in your work that you do as a friend, girlfriend, student, or otherwise, it pays off.
Every week, one full day was spent shooting in the driveway, with the garage’s blue door as my backdrop. The night before was spent selecting an interesting mix of vintage, ensuring that no two similar items were listed at the same time. This way, my items weren’t competing against one another, and I was able to maximize the potential of each. The models were cast via MySpace, and I paid them with a post-shoot trip to Burger Road. As I was not only the stylist, but the photographer as well, I developed a special talent for buttoning garments with one hand while holding my camera in the other.
When paying models with hamburgers didn’t work, I’d get in front of the camera myself.
I styled the models like real girls who had stepped right into a fashion editorial shoot. With my touch, a plus-size anorak became Comme des Garçons, and ski pants became Balenciaga. Silhouette was always the most important element in my photos. It was critical on eBay, because that was what stood out when potential customers were zooming through thumbnails, giving less than a microsecond’s thought to each item. But the more attention I paid to fashion photography, the more I realized that silhouette is what makes anything successful. If the silhouette is flattering, it doesn’t matter if the person wearing it doesn’t have runway model proportions.
I remember perusing a vintage store in San Francisco when the girl working there confessed to me that to get outfit inspiration before going out on Fridays, she visited Nasty Gal Vintage. I started to realize that, though I’d never intended to do so, I was providing my customers with a styling service. Because I was styling every piece of clothing I was selling head to toe, from the hair down to the shoes, I was showing girls how to style themselves. And though you’ll rarely hear me advocate giving anything away for free, this realization was one of the most profound and welcome ones I’ve had with the business. I always knew that Nasty Gal Vintage was about more than just selling stuff, but this proved it: What we were really doing was helping girls to look and feel awesome before they left the house.
The first time I wanted to play stylist, ceding control to another photographer, I made a friend for life in the process. When I came across Paul Trapani’s website, he was already a successful freelance photographer shooting editorials for magazines. I figured it was a long shot, but his number was listed on his website, so I called him up. I was shocked when he answered and had actually heard of Nasty Gal Vintage—at this point, I was just a girl in a room with a few dozen crazed customers, hardly anything I’d expect someone like Paul to have heard of. What was more, he was willing to work for trade, using the shots for his portfolio if I booked the models, found the location, and styled everything to perfection.
Though I had a devoted eBay following and my auctions were starting to close at higher and higher prices, Nasty Gal Vintage was still a pretty small-beans operation. However, if the offer of a free hamburger wasn’t enough to sway a potential model, the promise of a fun afternoon (and some shots of her looking gorgeous) usually was. I recruited Lisa, a beautiful five-foot-five brunette with doe eyes and pouty lips, to model, and we headed up to Port Costa. Port Costa is a remote little town in the East Bay that if one didn’t know better, could seem like it was solely occupied by Hell’s Angels. There’s a bar called the Warehouse with four hundred beers and a stuffed polar bear, a motel, and that’s about it. The motel was an old converted brothel, each room named after a working girl, like the Bertha Room or the Edna Room, and this was where we shot. The backdrop was a mix of awesome antique floral wallpaper and dumpy sofas from the ’80s, and the light was hard, on-camera flash softened by the hazy sun filtering in through the window. I even made a cameo as a model in a couple of the shots, and we had a total blast.