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1-Page Summary of #Girlboss
An Unlikely Business Genius
Sophia Amoruso is the founder and creative director of Nasty Gal, a company worth $100 million. She calls herself “a young, half-Greek Larry David in heels – incapable of hiding discomfort, dissatisfaction or doubt; inescapably myself; and often honest to a fault.” Her path to success has been unconventional. She’s struggled with her identity as an adolescent and college dropout who bounced from one minimum wage job to the next. She was able to become successful by paving her own way, working hard, having fun, learning rules and ignoring them when they don’t work for her. She prioritizes honesty over perfectionism because she believes that authenticity is more important than being perfect. She questions what other people take for granted because it helps keep things interesting at work while keeping a sense of humor about everything so that no matter how serious things are getting at work you can still have some fun with your coworkers.
Amoruso is a strong, independent woman who knows what she wants. She fought hard to get where she is and encourages other women to do the same. Nasty Gal clothing embodies Amoruso’s spirit of rebellion while also being sexy and smart for young women.
Nasty Gal Begins
In 2006, to get health insurance so she could afford medical treatment for a hernia, Amoruso took a job checking IDs in the lobby of San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. This allowed her plenty of time to keep up with MySpace and eBay messages about vintage clothing. In order to recuperate at home after surgery, she bought Starting an eBay Business for Dummies and decided to set up her own online vintage clothing store.
Amoruso started her eBay shop Nasty Gal Vintage by finding inspiration from the name of an album by funk singer Betty Davis. She named her store after a free-spirited and independent woman who makes her own decisions while wearing whatever she wants to wear. Amoruso bought some of the first pieces for her store from a theater company that went bankrupt, and she supplemented those finds with items she found at thrift stores. She hired a friend to model some items, took pictures of them and posted them on eBay along with their measurements and descriptions. Each week, she put new items up for auction on eBay, observed how they sold and adjusted what was available in her store accordingly. She relentlessly searched Craigslist for estate sales and combed through bins at thrift stores looking for great deals on vintage clothing each day. One lucky day, when shopping in a thrift store’s used clothes bin, Amoruso pulled out two Chanel jackets that had been left behind by someone else; she paid $8 each for them but then resold one jacket online for more than $1500!
As Nasty Gal grew, Sophia Amoruso started to use MySpace as a way to get potential clients. She eventually had 60,000 friends on the site and would add them all as friends in order to build her client list. However, this violated MySpace’s policies since she was using software that automatically added people who were similar to her existing connections. In addition, she blogged about each item for sale and responded directly to every comment or inquiry from these new connections. She treated these new “friends” like close girlfriends and made them feel special by responding quickly whenever they contacted her. One day when she saw that many of these customers were coming back for more styling advice after buying clothing items online, she decided it would be best if they could see complete outfits rather than just individual pieces of clothing so she hired a professional photographer to shoot the models wearing different looks based on what was available at Nasty Gal’s store at the time. The company continued growing with no money in its bank account until Amoruso finally got funding through an investment group led by Alexis Maybank (founder of Gilt Group) and Ron Burkle (billionaire investor).
