A misfit who grew up hating school, Sophia Amoruso left home at 17, intent on a life of anarchy and getting by for free. She says she received a rude wake-up call one day when she was caught shoplifting (but let off), which she had been doing in order to support her lifestyle.
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“I learned the hard way that taking shortcuts and living for free is not really living free,” she says.
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After the shoplifting incident in 2003, Sophia moved to San Francisco, California.
A community college drop-out, she developed a hernia and so started work as a security guard checking IDs at an art school – a job she took for the health insurance it provided.
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Bored, she decided to open an eBay store re-selling vintage clothing after reading a book called Starting an eBay Business for Dummies. She named her eBay store Nasty Gal Vintage.
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Sophia says eBay was a crucial platform because she learned to respond to every customer comment, to really understand who was buying her finds and what they wanted. That helped her beat other vintage sellers because she knew how to style the pieces she found – using young models who were paid a salary of burgers at a local restaurant – to appeal to her demographic.
After a spat with rival sellers ended with her getting kicked off eBay, she struck out on her own, buying the domain name NastyGalVintage.com and communicating with her customers through social media sites such as MySpace and eventually Facebook and Twitter.
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“Using social media allowed me to have a conversation with our customers – I would say it was the number one reason we created awareness,” she adds. Sophia says that her early mistakes were crucial in helping her build Nasty Gal from a simple eBay store selling vintage items in 2006 to a $100 million business with more than 350 employees selling cool, quirky new and used clothing items to millions of women around the world.
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She pioneered the idea of styling outfits from head to toe and mixing old and new, expensive and cheap and made sure that Nasty Gal wasn’t just a retail website, but a lifestyle that could appeal to a certain type of woman.
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Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-27414760
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