Success stories come in all shapes and sizes. For Sophia Amoruso it came in the form of vintage women’s clothing. This one time dumpster diver has managed to transform herself into a very successful, yet very down to earth, entrepreneur through sheer guts, tenacity, and innovation.
This brilliant story starts with a very common occurrence in the lives of many entrepreneurs, a side project. Sophia Amoruso managed an Ebay page named Nasty Gal that sold vintage clothing that were salvation army rejects. Eventually she dropped her day job scanning ID cards at the local community college and started to focus on Nasty Gal. Her business toke off. When the time came to move to her own site, www.shopnastygal.com, she had her Ebay page suspended for promoting the new site. Regardless of this minor hick-up she sold out of merchandise on the first day.
How did Sophia create such a demand so early in her career? She found a fabulous niche market for what she had, vintage. During her Ebay days she also discovered an interesting phenomenon in humans: they prefer to see an article of clothing on a human being rather than lying on the ground. It may sound simple to us now, however, in the day she was working it was very common for no model to be used to sell a piece of clothing. With this competitive advantage and a thoroughly fantastic niche market she was able to drive the demand that she saw on the opening day of her new site.
What has Sophia done since that first day? Simple, she has grown her company into a multimillion dollar company, one that reaped 100 million dollars in last year- profitable, and has had one of the single most explosive growth rates in the last decade. She has published #GIRLBOSS a hybrid memoir and business text. The vast majority of this text is devoted to her adolescence with common sense business lessons sown in like stitching on a sweater. Sophia Amoruso is certainly a #GIRLBOSS.
