A year after moving into the shipyard, Nasty Gal had already outgrown the space. The company moved to Gilman Street, in Berkeley, a block from the legendary punk club, into a storefront next to a piano store. Our one thousand square feet had become seventeen hundred square feet and we had our own parking. Score! Here, we hired our first team: someone to ship orders and someone to write product descriptions. I called up my old friend Paul, hoping he’d join part-time as our first photographer in our storefront-cum-warehouse. Paul, always up for an adventure, accepted.
After Paul came Stacey, my friend of several years who was then moonlighting at the Christian Dior boutique in San Francisco. She had impeccable taste and an iconic look: a rail-thin beauty with a mane of dark hair pouring over steep cheekbones. I trained Stacey in the styling tips and tricks of Nasty Gal, and it didn’t hurt that she had once been a makeup artist for Chanel. She, along with our intern, Nick, brushed, blushed, buttoned, zipped, glossed, and dusted away; I focused on buying, social media, and running the business; Christina managed our small team. While many people would be happy with a manageable small business, there was nothing manageable about this. It was growing by the minute, it seemed, and we were constantly in need of more everything—people, inventory, and space, for starters.
Our first logo and my first business card.
In eight short months we had outgrown our Berkeley storefront. We needed a proper warehouse, and I found one in the neighboring city of Emeryville, the famous home of Pixar. I had never thought I’d ever be taking on a seventy-five-hundred-square-foot space. I’d never worked in a warehouse and I had never negotiated such a hefty lease. I was both excited and terrified, and knew I needed more help than I currently had. The “champagne problem” of selling out of vintage faster than we could keep up with had begun happening with our designer stuff as well, which had by this point surpassed vintage in sales volume. We were growing 700 percent over the prior year, which is almost unheard of in retail. Customer e-mails came in faster than we could respond to them. Orders were packed with feverish delight, and my trusty ’87 Volvo and I were schlepping to Los Angeles weekly to buy, buy, buy up a storm.
I had begun working with a consultant, Dana Fried, who (surprise!) I found online. He’d been the COO and CFO at Taryn Rose shoes, and had a lot of experience in running companies. Dana and I decided that I needed someone to run the guts of the business: fulfillment, finance, and human resources. We wrote a job description for a director of operations, but what I ended up getting was someone who was much more than that; we got someone who would help shape the future of Nasty Gal.
Typically, people with Frank’s experience don’t apply for jobs. I was shocked to receive a résumé from someone who had twenty years of experience in operations at Lands’ End and had been COO of Nordstrom’s online and catalog business. But Frank knew that Nasty Gal was on a tear, and also knew that type of fun is hard to come by. Frank had a lot of solutions. He told me about this thing called an “org chart,” a tool companies use to map out the structure and hierarchy of their teams. Then, he told me about “departments.” It was like we were inventing the wheel! First came a director of human resources. Then a controller. After that, a customer care manager, an inventory planner, and a manager of fulfillment. We got an IT guy. We got assistant buyers, and I got an assistant. We split up shipping and receiving, and created a returns department. Cody joined the team full time and became our e-commerce manager. We turned on the phones for the first time and had multiple lines and headsets—so official! No longer did our customers have to e-mail to reach us—they could just call! You are welcome, customers!
As we plotted and strategized, I was a sponge, soaking it all up. As the business grew, I grew, and the ambiguity that once terrified me became something I thrived on. I was still ADD, but found that running my own company meant that every single day, if not every hour, there was some sort of new challenge to tackle, a new problem to solve, and there was no time to linger on anything, let alone get bored. We hit our first $100,000 day, and I decided to celebrate: I rented a giant, horse-shaped bounce house and had it blown up in the warehouse. Send a few e-mails, bounce bounce bounce. Ship a few orders, bounce bounce bounce . . . It was pretty much the best day ever.
To everyone’s surprise but mine, we outgrew our Emeryville warehouse in just one short year. By this time, I was getting used to the growth. It didn’t make it any easier, but I could at least see around the corner, even if just a little. I stopped listening to the folks with experience—even Dana—because even they hadn’t seen the magnitude of growth we were experiencing. In the fall of 2010, I once again started the search for more space. I was growing weary of my monthly and sometimes weekly trips to LA, where I crashed on my friend Kate’s couch so much that I started to worry about wearing out my welcome. Nearly every showroom and designer we worked with was down there, and I was flying in to cast models we then flew up to shoot with us. I knew that I wanted to design and manufacture our own products, and that the Bay Area was a wasteland of creative talent who were just not right for us. With such conservative brands as Gap, Macy’s, and Banana Republic as our neighbors, hiring was nearly impossible. For these reasons, I made the decision to move the company to Los Angeles.
Two months later, that is exactly what I did. I asked thirteen team members if they would relocate, and all but one said yes. Three and a half years later, they’re almost all still here in LA, growing along with me and about three hundred and fifty others.
PORTRAIT OF A #GIRLBOSS:
Christina Ferrucci, Buying Director at Nasty Gal
I put myself through college working at a store in San Francisco and it was there that I realized I had a knack for curating clothing. After I graduated, I thought about fashion blogging among other things and came across a Craigslist post for an assistant at a place called Nasty Gal. I’d never heard of the brand and at the time my wardrobe was composed of daily deals from the Haight Street Goodwill, but I liked that it was vintage clothing and it spoke to me in a way that was unfamiliar but authentic. At the time I was beyond broke and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do, and it seemed like being an assistant was temporary and I could leave at any time. Five years later I’m still here. I didn’t set out on a charted career path; I chose to follow what I’m good at and what interests me.
At the beginning Nasty Gal was a one-woman show operating out of a small studio space. It was overwhelming to watch Sophia bounce from being behind the camera to styling a pair of pants to creating the graphics for an e-mail, but her energy was contagious. Sophia was very connected with the customers and held herself to a high standard to keep them engaged and satisfied. She put a lot of pressure on herself, and so I did, too. After a few weeks at Nasty Gal I was part of what quickly became a two-woman show.
Sophia and I learned about the business as we went along, most of which was through trial and error. If a style worked really well, we took note and tried to replicate that success. If a style was bad, it was dead to us. Pretty simple guidelines, but keeping it simple has always been part of the Nasty Gal DNA. Walking through our first trade show and saying the name Nasty Gal was an unforgettable experience and a life lesson in the power of persistence. We always said the name at least twice, because everyone asked us to repeat it. Then a vague smile or a bad joke would be followed up with Sophia’s getting on her smartphone and showing them that it was a real website and it was cute. We made a lot of mistakes at that trade show about what we thought the customer wanted and what was right for the brand. Ultimately, we learned more than we would have if we hadn’t taken those risks, and to this day I instill those takeaways in our buying team. I’ve learned to make really quick decisions that shape the future in a positive way. One talent that I bring to the table is my ability to insult the clothing. For example, “the colors of those pants look like hospital scrubs” or “the shape of that dress is for a toddler.” This ability has served me well and has probably saved the customer from some questionable choices. Looking at the product is still my favorite part. I want to be part of creating the best shopping experience for our customer and I feel that Nasty Gal has the ability to do that better than anyone’s ever done before.