Whoa Is Me: The Purple Flapper Dress Saga
Toward the end of my time on eBay in early 2008, I bought a flapper dress that had probably been a costume at one point. It was purple polyester and I styled it like a cute going-out dress. It sold for $400, and the girl who bought it was actually another eBay vintage seller, who wore it to her bachelorette party in Las Vegas.
But the eBay forums lit up. The forum trolls claimed that she and I were in cahoots, bidding on each other’s stuff to drive up the prices, and that my dress wasn’t even vintage. I had never claimed that this was a dress from the flapper era, and if the girl who bought it wasn’t happy with it, I’d gladly have taken it back—but she loved the dress and felt she got what she paid for.
When noted fashion blogger Susie Bubble wrote about Nasty Gal Vintage in 2008, the comments section turned into a total catfight mostly related to what one commenter called “the purple flapper dress saga.” Some people were defending me; others were leaving comments claiming that I had “risen to the top of the eBay heap based on FALSEHOODS and LIES.” Finally, it frustrated Susie so much that she intervened. “I can’t know everything and frankly . . . sometimes I just don’t want to . . . ,” she wrote. I stayed out of it, keeping my head down and doing my best as I’ve always done.
At this time, I was already planning to leave eBay because the business was growing so quickly and I was ready for the next step. With Nasty Gal Vintage, I had finally found something that I was good at and kept me engaged. I was beginning to see that it had potential far beyond anything that I had ever imagined, and to see that potential I’d have to go out on my own. However, this didn’t make all the shit talking any easier to take. eBay was my whole world, and I looked up to a lot of those other sellers. Regardless, eBay made the choice for me. My account was suspended just as I was about to launch the website. The reason? Doing what I did best—getting free marketing. I was leaving the URL of my future website in the feedback area for my customers.
No More Auctions
Finally, after a year and a half, I had outgrown the pool house. I moved the business into a one-thousand-square-foot loft in an old shipyard in Benicia, California—even farther from all of my friends in the city. I bought the URL nastygalvintage.com, because at the time, nastygal.com was still registered to a porn site (sorry, moms!). I enlisted my middle school friend Cody, who was a developer. I did the graphic design and he did the programming. We picked out the e-commerce platform together, and he made it work. It was the first and last website I’ve ever designed.
When you leave eBay, you can’t take your customer information with you. While I had none of my customers’ e-mail addresses, I had my sixty thousand friends on MySpace to fall back on. When the Nasty Gal Vintage site launched on Friday the 13th of June 2008, everything sold out in the first day. Kelly Ripa’s stylist called and asked if I had another one of those vintage jackets, but in an Extra Small? Um, no, I did not.
Soon after, I hired my first employee, Christina Ferrucci. For the first year, I paid her more than I was paying myself. She haggled from $14 an hour to $16, both of which were more than I’d ever been paid, and in the back of my head, I was worried about whether I’d be able to keep her busy. But she was worth that, and more, and she was definitely busy. On her second week of work, she got so sick on her way in that she threw up in her car while driving and just kept right on, finally making her way to work. In she came, packed a bunch of orders, drove to the post office and shipped them, then went back home and crawled into bed. Christina is still with me today and is now Nasty Gal’s buying director. If business is war, I always think that’s the kind of #GIRLBOSS I want next to me in the trenches.
After over two years of selling exclusively vintage, I wanted to give our customer more of what she wanted. We were already good at curating ultra-memorable editorial vintage pieces for her, so why not curate new things as well? I was getting tired of the vintage schlep—selling out week after week, with no future of taking a vacation in sight.
Six months after launching the website, Christina and I attended our first trade show in Las Vegas. No one had heard of us, and we had never done this before. I approached Jeffrey Campbell’s booth, knowing he was a brand we wanted to work with. I was instantly told no. One thing you should know about me is when I hear no, I rarely listen. It takes a special kind of stubbornness to succeed as an entrepreneur. And anyway, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. I marched back, opened up my smartphone, and showed Jeffrey what he was missing out on nastygalvintage.com. Soon after, we were Jeffrey Campbell’s newest online store and to this day we are one of his biggest customers. I also approached Sam Edelman, and when they were resistant, showed them the website and promised that we would make their brand cool. We did, and soon after we had sold $75,000 worth of their Zoe boot.
We started slowly. We purchased some stuff from a brand called Rojas; I remember it distinctly. Our first delivery was a red-and-black plaid trapeze dress with a shirt collar and button-down front. I shot it on Nida, my five-foot-nine Thai dream girl of a model who had been the star of the eBay store. A New Orleans refugee, she was a mere sixteen when she began modeling for me (I found her on MySpace, naturally), eventually graduating from high school while continuing to be paid in hamburgers and $20 bills. The dress sold out, and we reordered it.
We started buying units of six, testing the waters to see what sold and what didn’t. If it sold, we learned. If it didn’t sell, we learned. And we kept on learning. Six units became twelve, twelve became twenty-four, and our once exclusively vintage business became an online destination where the coolest girls could find not only vintage, but small designers at good prices, styled in a way no one had seen before. Nasty Gal was our customers’ best-kept secret, but word got out—and on we grew. Sometimes Christina and I got confused and asked each other if an item had been taken down because it had suddenly disappeared from the site. On these occasions we spent a few minutes trying to figure out the system glitch before we finally realized that it had sold out almost immediately.
Though these terms are all too familiar to me now, I didn’t know back then what “market research” or “direct to consumer” meant, or even that my customers constituted a “demographic.” I just knew that talking to the girls who bought from me was important and always had been. When MySpace began its descent toward becoming a Justin Timberlake pet project, I, along with my customers, migrated to other social networks and kept the 24/7 conversation going. I thrived on it. My customers told me what they wanted, and I always knew that if I listened to them, we’d both do okay. We did better than okay, though. Together we were fucking amazing.