formerly known as: Scent Of A Woman
April 12, 2013
March 27, 2013
Naughty in Name Only
Naughty in Name Only
By NICOLE PERLROTH | New York Times – Sun, 24 Mar, 2013 9:50 PM EDT
Nasty Gal is “the fastest-growing retailer in the …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. (At the time, NastyGal.com belonged to a pornography site. Nasty Gal now owns the domain.)
She recruited a friend from junior high school to build a Web site and taught herself to use Photoshop. She eventually abandoned Myspace for Facebook, where she tantalized fans with coming inventory, from cheap shrunken motorcycle jackets to high-end vintage Versace clothing.
She challenged her Facebook fans to come up with the best titles for vintage products and gave gift cards to the winners. She used models who were approachable and “looked like nice people, not dead people,” she said, and had to fire some when customers complained that they looked too skinny or annoyed.
That constant conversation with customers created a loyal following. Nasty Gal has no marketing team, but fans comment on its every Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest post and regularly post pictures of themselves in their Nasty Gal finds. A quarter of Nasty Gal’s 550,000 customers visit the site daily for six minutes; the top 10 percent return more than 100 times a month.
With Nasty Gal having made just shy of $100 million in revenue last year, analysts say they would expect a bigger audience.
“I would expect them to have a few million visitors a month,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst. On the flip side, Ms. Mulpuru said Nasty Gal’s conversion rate must be significantly higher than the industry standard of 3 percent. “It speaks to an engaged audience,” she said. “They’ve figured out the marketing tool. That’s the real story.”
Ms. Amoruso knew Nasty Gal couldn’t grow by selling one-off vintage items forever; customers were asking why she didn’t have more sizes. So in 2008, she posted an ad on Craigslist for a buying assistant and hired Christina Ferrucci, the first person who answered.
The two experimented with buying vintage-inspired clothes from vendors in Los Angeles’s fashion district. Soon, the items were selling so quickly that Ms. Amoruso and Ms. Ferrucci were making the six-hour drive to Los Angeles every other week.
They ventured to the Project trade show in Las Vegas, where fashion brands and buyers convene every August, but higher-end brands weren’t exactly thrilled at the idea of having their products sold by a brand called Nasty Gal. Many dismissed it as an online sex shop. The fact that the NastyGal.com domain was at that time still owned by a pornography site didn’t help matters.
Sam Edelman, the shoe brand, initially gave Ms. Amoruso the cold shoulder. She charged back an hour later, showed them Nasty Gal’s Web site on her iPhone and promised to deliver the brand some street cred. Sam Edelman acquiesced. That opened the door for a deal with Jeffrey Campbell, another shoemaker, which has become one of the most recognizable brands on the site. Nasty Gal fans will tell you Sophia Amoruso “made” Jeffrey Campbell, not the other way around.
A Jeffrey Campbell spokeswoman, Sharon Blackburn, said that the brand was well established before partnering with Ms. Amoruso, but that Nasty Gal created a new channel for its more provocative styles, like the “Lita,” a towering lace-up platform boot with a five-inch heel. “Not a lot of people got it, but Sophia loved it,” Ms. Blackburn said. “She bought it in every color and fabric, wore it herself and opened the door for other styles in our collection.”
By 2010, Nasty Gal started generating buzz among unlikely fans in Silicon Valley. Venture capital firms were pouring millions into e-commerce sites like ShoeDazzle.com, Kim Kardashian’s shoe subscription site, and BeachMint.
But the company had been making money from Day 1. “They would say, ‘We want to invest in a woman-owned business — it’s part of our investment thesis,’ ” Ms. Amoruso recalled of her discussions with several venture capitalists. Her retort: She didn’t want to be part of their “investment thesis” and didn’t need their money.
“I don’t think they got it,” she said. “It’s this bunch of guys sitting around saying, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s start a Web site and put Kim Kardashian’s face on it.’ ”
Ms. Amoruso moved Nasty Gal to Los Angeles in 2011, to be closer to her merchants and models. She shunned office space in Santa Monica, where ShoeDazzle and BeachMint are based, for less glamorous space downtown, where 20-something Nasty Gal employees in mesh crop tops, leggings and platform shoes stand out from the paralegals. (Shortly after the move, one employee was berated by a lawyer in the building who saw “Nasty Gal Creative Studio” and assumed it was a pornography studio.)
Last year, Ms. Amoruso, who had held on to 100 percent of her business, decided she was ready to hear what Sand Hill Road had to offer. She met with several venture capitalists but ultimately clicked with Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures, who had invested in e-commerce sites like Net-a-Porter, Etsy and Asos.
In March, Ms. Amoruso agreed to give Index a slice of equity for $9 million. But by August, things were moving so quickly — Nasty Gal was on track to quadruple its 2011 sales to $128 million — that she raised an additional $40 million from Index and used some of it to build a 500,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Shepherdsville, Ky. Nasty Gal now attracts more than six million visits a month, while e-commerce start-ups like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint are losing customers and executives.
Bigger competitors are taking notes. Urban Outfitters recently contacted Ms. Amoruso about a potential acquisition, according to people briefed on the discussions. Asked about that, Ms. Amoruso said only, “We’re talking.”
Naysayers in Silicon Valley think she should consider the acquisition. Some venture capitalists who would not speak on the record — perhaps because they did not have the chance to invest — say Nasty Gal is playing on a short-term fashion trend that will be difficult to sustain on the public market.
“They’re the hot new thing, but I do think it’s risky,” said Ms. Mulpuru, the Forrester analyst. “With this type of hype, either they are looking for a big fat acquisition or a blockbuster I.P.O.”
Ms. Amoruso is hardly ignorant of the possibility that it could all fall apart. Nasty Gal’s motto is, “Nasty Gals do it better.” But her personal motto is, “Only the paranoid survive.”
At 16, Ms. Amoruso tattooed the Virgin Records logo on her arm. Last year, she enjoyed a small Cinderella moment when she got to show it to Richard Branson. She recently bought a Porsche — with cash — and is remodeling her dream home.
But, she said, the Cinderella story ends here. “It’s been very charmed, but I’m not willing to rest on my laurels,” she said. “It’s only going to get harder to keep building from here.”
http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/naughty-name-only-015034664.html
By NICOLE PERLROTH | New York Times – Sun, 24 Mar, 2013 9:50 PM EDT
Nasty Gal is “the fastest-growing retailer in the …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. (At the time, NastyGal.com belonged to a pornography site. Nasty Gal now owns the domain.)
She recruited a friend from junior high school to build a Web site and taught herself to use Photoshop. She eventually abandoned Myspace for Facebook, where she tantalized fans with coming inventory, from cheap shrunken motorcycle jackets to high-end vintage Versace clothing.
She challenged her Facebook fans to come up with the best titles for vintage products and gave gift cards to the winners. She used models who were approachable and “looked like nice people, not dead people,” she said, and had to fire some when customers complained that they looked too skinny or annoyed.
That constant conversation with customers created a loyal following. Nasty Gal has no marketing team, but fans comment on its every Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest post and regularly post pictures of themselves in their Nasty Gal finds. A quarter of Nasty Gal’s 550,000 customers visit the site daily for six minutes; the top 10 percent return more than 100 times a month.
With Nasty Gal having made just shy of $100 million in revenue last year, analysts say they would expect a bigger audience.
“I would expect them to have a few million visitors a month,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst. On the flip side, Ms. Mulpuru said Nasty Gal’s conversion rate must be significantly higher than the industry standard of 3 percent. “It speaks to an engaged audience,” she said. “They’ve figured out the marketing tool. That’s the real story.”
Ms. Amoruso knew Nasty Gal couldn’t grow by selling one-off vintage items forever; customers were asking why she didn’t have more sizes. So in 2008, she posted an ad on Craigslist for a buying assistant and hired Christina Ferrucci, the first person who answered.
The two experimented with buying vintage-inspired clothes from vendors in Los Angeles’s fashion district. Soon, the items were selling so quickly that Ms. Amoruso and Ms. Ferrucci were making the six-hour drive to Los Angeles every other week.
They ventured to the Project trade show in Las Vegas, where fashion brands and buyers convene every August, but higher-end brands weren’t exactly thrilled at the idea of having their products sold by a brand called Nasty Gal. Many dismissed it as an online sex shop. The fact that the NastyGal.com domain was at that time still owned by a pornography site didn’t help matters.
Sam Edelman, the shoe brand, initially gave Ms. Amoruso the cold shoulder. She charged back an hour later, showed them Nasty Gal’s Web site on her iPhone and promised to deliver the brand some street cred. Sam Edelman acquiesced. That opened the door for a deal with Jeffrey Campbell, another shoemaker, which has become one of the most recognizable brands on the site. Nasty Gal fans will tell you Sophia Amoruso “made” Jeffrey Campbell, not the other way around.
A Jeffrey Campbell spokeswoman, Sharon Blackburn, said that the brand was well established before partnering with Ms. Amoruso, but that Nasty Gal created a new channel for its more provocative styles, like the “Lita,” a towering lace-up platform boot with a five-inch heel. “Not a lot of people got it, but Sophia loved it,” Ms. Blackburn said. “She bought it in every color and fabric, wore it herself and opened the door for other styles in our collection.”
By 2010, Nasty Gal started generating buzz among unlikely fans in Silicon Valley. Venture capital firms were pouring millions into e-commerce sites like ShoeDazzle.com, Kim Kardashian’s shoe subscription site, and BeachMint.
But the company had been making money from Day 1. “They would say, ‘We want to invest in a woman-owned business — it’s part of our investment thesis,’ ” Ms. Amoruso recalled of her discussions with several venture capitalists. Her retort: She didn’t want to be part of their “investment thesis” and didn’t need their money.
“I don’t think they got it,” she said. “It’s this bunch of guys sitting around saying, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s start a Web site and put Kim Kardashian’s face on it.’ ”
Ms. Amoruso moved Nasty Gal to Los Angeles in 2011, to be closer to her merchants and models. She shunned office space in Santa Monica, where ShoeDazzle and BeachMint are based, for less glamorous space downtown, where 20-something Nasty Gal employees in mesh crop tops, leggings and platform shoes stand out from the paralegals. (Shortly after the move, one employee was berated by a lawyer in the building who saw “Nasty Gal Creative Studio” and assumed it was a pornography studio.)
Last year, Ms. Amoruso, who had held on to 100 percent of her business, decided she was ready to hear what Sand Hill Road had to offer. She met with several venture capitalists but ultimately clicked with Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures, who had invested in e-commerce sites like Net-a-Porter, Etsy and Asos.
In March, Ms. Amoruso agreed to give Index a slice of equity for $9 million. But by August, things were moving so quickly — Nasty Gal was on track to quadruple its 2011 sales to $128 million — that she raised an additional $40 million from Index and used some of it to build a 500,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Shepherdsville, Ky. Nasty Gal now attracts more than six million visits a month, while e-commerce start-ups like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint are losing customers and executives.
Bigger competitors are taking notes. Urban Outfitters recently contacted Ms. Amoruso about a potential acquisition, according to people briefed on the discussions. Asked about that, Ms. Amoruso said only, “We’re talking.”
Naysayers in Silicon Valley think she should consider the acquisition. Some venture capitalists who would not speak on the record — perhaps because they did not have the chance to invest — say Nasty Gal is playing on a short-term fashion trend that will be difficult to sustain on the public market.
“They’re the hot new thing, but I do think it’s risky,” said Ms. Mulpuru, the Forrester analyst. “With this type of hype, either they are looking for a big fat acquisition or a blockbuster I.P.O.”
Ms. Amoruso is hardly ignorant of the possibility that it could all fall apart. Nasty Gal’s motto is, “Nasty Gals do it better.” But her personal motto is, “Only the paranoid survive.”
At 16, Ms. Amoruso tattooed the Virgin Records logo on her arm. Last year, she enjoyed a small Cinderella moment when she got to show it to Richard Branson. She recently bought a Porsche — with cash — and is remodeling her dream home.
But, she said, the Cinderella story ends here. “It’s been very charmed, but I’m not willing to rest on my laurels,” she said. “It’s only going to get harder to keep building from here.”
http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/naughty-name-only-015034664.html
March 26, 2013
March 20, 2013
March 19, 2013
Happy Spring!
Happy Spring!
Be beautiful and fresh...
The Vernal Equinox
Ah, spring! This season brings increasing daylight, warming temperatures, and the rebirth of flora and fauna.
The word equinox is derived from the Latin words meaning “equal night.” Days and nights are approximately equal everywhere and the Sun rises and sets due east and west.
At the equinoxes, the tilt of Earth relative to the Sun is zero, which means that Earth’s axis neither points toward nor away from the Sun. (However, the tilt of Earth relative to its plane of orbit, called the ecliptic plane, is always about 23.5 degrees.)
The 10 Biggest Reasons Men Resent Their Wives
By Woman s Day | Love + Sex – Mon, 18 Mar, 2013
Avoid resentment in your marriage with these expert pointersBy Kerry Miller
Despite the picture-perfect impressions we get from upbeat Facebook posts or boastful holiday letters, even the healthiest marriages aren't 100% free of conflict. At some point, virtually everyone feels wronged by a romantic partner. Bob Navarra, PsyD, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT), says that those feelings aren't what throw a marriage off course-it's how couples handle them. "While it may be frustrating that the toothpaste cap was left off, happy couples talk about these small things," he says. But when those emotions are swept under the rug, a more toxic variety of negativity begins to fester: resentment. Here, marriage experts share some of the most common reasons husbands resent their wives and how to protect your relationship. Photo by Getty Images.
1. Not fighting fair.
Happy couples don't necessarily fight less, Dr. Navarra says; they just fight better, by "describing their own feelings and needs rather than labeling their partner as faulty." And the ball is probably in your court for that. Research shows that wives are more likely to bring up problems for discussion, while husbands are more likely to withdraw at the first sign of an argument. When this keeps happening, women tend to start conversations on a negative note, which only makes things worse. Instead of resorting to personal attacks-"You're such a slob!" "We're going to be late because of you!"-which lead to defensiveness, Dr. Navarra recommends sticking to "I-statements," such as "When (this happens), I feel (frustrated, angry). What I needed was..."
Related: Discover 9 fights you should have with your husband.
2. Treating him like a child.
"A big issue I see in couples is a man resenting his partner because he feels she talks down to him," says Mary Kelleher, LMFT. This can leave him feeling "less-than," and nothing triggers resentment faster than inadequacy. So avoid threatening his independence-the way pressuring him to go for a promotion so he'll bring home more money may be perceived-suggests couples therapist Vagdevi Meunier, PsyD. "No one wants to feel 'managed' by a spouse," Dr. Meunier says
3. Involving other people in your marriage.
What you might think of as harmless complaining to friends and family can actually break your husband's trust. It threatens the safety of the "couple bubble" you've created together. "Men find this humiliating and hurtful," says Norene Gonsiewski, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), a couples' therapist at the Portland Relationship Center in Oregon. If you really need to vent, consider talking to a doctor or therapist to keep things confidential.
Related: Check out 10 things husbands should never do.
4. Not showing appreciation for thing he does right.
"Men will never ask for it," Gonsiewski says, but regular doses of praise are important. "They need to hear that their wives are proud of them." Scott Haltzman, MD, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women, notes that men tend to be more action-oriented than women, which means they show affection in different ways. "He may empty the dishwasher as a way of saying he cares about you." Haltzman's suggestion: "Pay attention to what he does, and let him know you notice."
5. Withholding sex as punishment.
While women generally need emotional intimacy to make love, men express emotional intimacy through sex, says Marla Taviano, author of Is that All He Thinks About? When a wife turns down sex, in her husband's mind, "she's turning him down as a person," explains Taviano. Using sex as a bargaining chip to get your needs meet isn't negotiating-it's emotional blackmail, which can alienate him. "Withholding sex may make your partner feel less love from you and give you less love in return," says Dr. Haltzman.
Related: Learn 8 secrets of sexually satisfied couples.
6. Trying to change him.
"Every person can change, but it's better to focus on our own changes, rather than our spouse's behaviors," says Anne Ziff, LMFT, author of Marrying Well. And yet, some women see marriage as a starting point for a "husband makeover." This isn't all bad-studies show that married men tend to eat healthier and have fewer problems with drugs and alcohol than single guys-but avoid creating a relationship in which your husband can't be himself. "When a man feels his home is not his castle, and he can't just be a guy-whether it's walking around in his boxers or letting out a burp-he'll feel like he's been put in a box where he has to act prim and proper all the time," Dr. Meunier says. Sometimes, it's smarter to let the little things slide.
7. Making important decisions without his input.
Research shows that money is a top source of disagreements among married couples, even those with bigger budgets. In a lot of ways, money equals power, and balancing power is important to harmonious relationships, Meunier says. Whether you're considering booking a vacation or buying a dishwasher, your partner deserves a say. The same goes for decisions that affect how you and your husband spend your time, such as inviting company over for dinner or signing up your kids for soccer. Although it may seem simpler to beg for forgiveness instead of getting him on board, unilateral decision making can drive you two apart.
8. Not giving him the chance to be the kind of dad he wants to be.
Mothers often parent differently than fathers, but not necessarily better. For instance, some studies show that parenting styles more common with dads, such as rough-and-tumble play, offer children unique developmental benefits. "Men's resentment grows as their children develop with gaps in their competency and independence, two attributes men rate highly," Gonsiewski says. "When a woman doesn't trust her husband to parent she sends a message that he's wrong and only she's right." Instead, "reinforce your husband for the positive contributions he makes to your children's lives," Dr. Haltzman recommends.
9. Acting jealous when he looks at other women.
Men are visual creatures, Dr. Meunier says, so it's not surprising that a typical heterosexual man would notice a good-looking woman. "Women who understand this and don't take it personally minimize unproductive fights about jealousy." When a wife overreacts to a situation, her husband will likely feel defensive, and eventually, resentful. Dr. Meunier's advice? "Chill out." Responding to a visual cue isn't cause for worry, she says-curious comments or behaviors, like dropping your hand to head across the room to talk to another woman, could signify a lack of commitment to you.
10. Expecting immediate forgiveness after you apologize.
Studies show that seeking and granting forgiveness greatly contributes to marital satisfaction and longevity. But beware of empty words. While apologizing manages conflict, Dr. Navarra says a simple "I'm sorry" often isn't enough. To truly earn her husband's forgiveness, a wife needs to show that she understands why her husband is upset. Dr. Haltzman recommends being specific about what you're apologizing for, accepting responsibility for what you did, acknowledging that you what you did was harmful and lastly, asking what you can do to make it up to him. "If you've gotten to the first three steps cleanly, most men will say 'forget about it' to the last question," Dr. Haltzman says.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
blog visitors
