Being a part of Nasty Gal’s success has been surprising, exciting, and completely insane at times. As the first employee, I’ve worn many different hats (most at the same time). From being an assistant to going over HR benefits with new hires to being a buyer, customer care rep, or a manager to a shipping department full of dudes—you name it, I’ve done it. Now, as the buying director, I can say this has been a strange but rewarding career. When I applied for that Craigslist ad I stumbled on something that comes across once in a lifetime. It was meant to be.
“There are secret opportunities hidden inside every failure.”
3
Shitty Jobs Saved My Life
It was the straying that found the path direct.
—Austin Osman Spare
The only good thing about being a child model was that I got to skip school.
I think I may hold some kind of record for Most Shitty Jobs Held Prior to Turning Eighteen. Or if not that, I’d most certainly win the Most Shitty Jobs That Lasted Two Weeks or Less Award. As a kid, I’d dabbled in employment: lemonade stands, a paper route, babysitting, and a brief stint as a child model that ended when I failed to muster the enthusiasm to jump up and down and shout “Pizza Pizza!” at a Little Caesars casting. My high school years were like speed dating, but for jobs. Maybe none of these shitty jobs really saved my life, but I do believe that my variety of short-lived failures, or as I prefer to call it, job promiscuity, made me an experienced young adult. When you have an attention span the length of an eyelash, it doesn’t take long to learn what you like and what you don’t. I generally have to throw a ton of shit at the wall before learning what sticks (and no, it is no longer literally shit). To the misfortune of all the employers I’ve left in my wake, it was well worth it.
Evidence of the low point otherwise known as Catholic school.
Before the tale of my litany of shitty jobs began, I attended ten schools in my twelve years of education. Because we moved, because our financial situation changed, because I hated it. By the time I was in third grade, my parents didn’t know what to do with me—I got in trouble for being “off task,” reading a dictionary in the back of the classroom. Some miracle qualified me to be placed in a rapid-learner program in third grade, which ended up being a joke—we read newspapers on the floor all day and my teacher “didn’t believe in math.” Obviously, this was not the solution, so I was then placed in Catholic school. And guess what? That didn’t work either!
No matter where I went, I was an outsider (and generally led with poop humor, which didn’t make me many friends). I got along as well with the cool kids as I did with the nerds. That spirit of forced tourism, along with my quickly learned survival mechanisms, eventually also made it easy to jump from job to job. Fortunately, the economy was in good shape when I began working at the age of fifteen, which allowed me to get a job, quit, and get hired again very easily. I was never disappointed when a particular job didn’t work out, since I’d already lived an entire life feeling so far out of place that I’d given up hope that any one thing, place, person, or occupation could be my calling.
Misadventures in Job Promiscuity
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
—Douglas Adams
This difficulty in “getting along” lasted throughout my entire youth. As a high school student, every time I heard the school bell ring, I told myself my life was over before it had even begun. When you’re eating lunch with your über-liberal history teacher instead of hanging with friends, you know it’s time to go. I managed to convince my parents to let me home-school for the last part of my sophomore year. I had a teacher who came over once a month to dole out assignments, but most of my time was spent working. There was a Subway near our house, so I walked over, filled out an application, and became a Sandwich Artist. I wore the green polo shirt and visor with pride, working the day shift and conquering the lunch rush, despite not yet knowing what a lunch rush was.
Part of my job was to wear gloves and massage mayonnaise into the tuna. Sexy! I’d slap the tuna into a bowl and pour out half a gallon of mayonnaise, put gloves on, and massage the mayo in with my hands. Another favorite was the seafood, which arrived in a giant slab of perforated fake crab that I’d break apart with my fingers and go to town on.
I don’t even remember why I quit, but the next job I got was working at a Borders bookstore. I really enjoyed this job. At the time, Who Moved My Cheese? was the book that everyone came in asking for. I didn’t know what it was about, and I still don’t. Sadly, my work at Borders did not involve mayo or rubber gloves, but working the information desk was a big step up, as I got to use my brain.
Borders put their staff through a pretty major training program, which, despite my anticorporate leanings at this point in life, I found highly valuable and still do. For example, they taught me to say “yes” instead of “sure”; or “let me check” instead of “I don’t know” when I was helping customers. A very important tidbit about customer service: just apologize to people. Even if it’s not your fault, they’ve been disappointed by the company you work for and it’s your job to empathize with them. Though you may be paid minimum wage, to the customers you are the face of the entire company. It’s this kind of accountability that gets people raises, promotions, and eventually careers.
As a teenager and into my early twenties, I thought that I would never embrace capitalism, much less be a public champion for it. I was certain that I’d live my years out trying to make a career as a photographer, getting by holding jobs because I had to, not because I wanted to. I’m not that cynical anymore. I’ve learned that it’s typically the larger companies out there that provide the template for employees to chart a path for themselves and continue to develop in their respective fields as well as in their management skills. At Nasty Gal today, we have a little something we call “Our Philosophy” that’s posted around the office. We employ an amazing Human Resources and Benefits team to ensure that our practices are fair and that our employees are well taken care of. Before Nasty Gal, I hardly knew what HR stood for (high rise, as in jeans? Or HR, the lead singer from Bad Brains?), and a philosophy was something that I would have fully rolled my eyes at. But when a company is on a trajectory as crazy as Nasty Gal’s, and becomes as big as Nasty Gal, these kinds of things are more than just corporate mumbo jumbo—they’re integral to having a positive company culture.