The $100 million e-Bay success

[Hum]

LOS ANGELES ? If ever there were a Cinderella of tech, Sophia Amoruso might be it.

In 2006, Ms. Amoruso was a 22-year-old community college dropout, living in her step-aunt?s cottage, working at an art school checking student IDs for $13 an hour. Then she started a side project, Nasty Gal, an eBay page that sold vintage women?s clothing.

Last year, Nasty Gal sold nearly $100 million of clothing and accessories ? profitably.

For the last seven years, Ms. Amoruso has been courting a cult following of 20-something women. Nasty Gal has more than half a million followers on Facebook and more than 600,000 on Instagram. But it is not yet well known beyond that base. At fashion trade shows, the company?s name still gets strange looks.

?People say: ?Nasty Gal? What?s that?? ? Ms. Amoruso, now 28, said in an interview at her new headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. ?I tell them, ?It?s the fastest-growing retailer in the country.? ?

Back in 2006, she toyed with the idea of going to photography school, but couldn?t stomach the debt. Instead, she quit her job and started an eBay page to sell some of the vintage designer items she found rummaging through Goodwill bins. She bought a Chanel jacket at a Salvation Army store for $8 and sold it for $1,000. She found Yves Saint Laurent clothing online on the cheap by Googling misspellings of the designer?s name, reasoning that anyone who didn?t know how to spell Yves Saint Laurent probably didn?t realize his value.

She styled, photographed, captioned and shipped each product herself and sold about 25 items a week. She named the eBay page ?Nasty Gal? after the 1975 album by Betty Davis ? not the smoky-eyed film star Bette Davis, but the unabashedly sexy funk singer and style icon Betty, whose brief marriage to the jazz legend Miles Davis inspired the song ?Back Seat Betty.?

Ms. Amoruso curated her eBay page to match her own style, which on a recent rainy Friday included a floor-length trench coat, vintage rock T-shirt, no-nonsense bob and blood-red lipstick. Her look and attitude resonated with the type of young, body-confident women who would not be caught dead in Tory Burch.

She created a Myspace page to market Nasty Gal and garnered 60,000 ?friends? by reaching out to fans of brands like Nylon, the music and fashion magazine, who she thought might appreciate Nasty Gal?s fierce aesthetic. Every week, her new finds ignited bidding wars among shoppers from Australia to Britain.

She began enlisting friends to model and photograph her products, which quickly outgrew her step-aunt?s cottage. She moved Nasty Gal?s headquarters to a 1,700-square-foot studio in Berkeley, Calif., in 2007, and eight months later moved again ? this time to a 7,500-square-foot warehouse space in Emeryville.

Ms. Amoruso also outgrew eBay, which she said was a terrible platform to start a business. Competitors started flagging Nasty Gal for breaking the site?s rules by, for example, linking to Ms. Amoruso?s Myspace page. Fed up, she decided it was time to start ShopNastyGal.com.

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[Growled Member]

Good things happens when you follow your dreams.