Nasty Gal

Nasty Gal Inc.

Type	Private Company
Industry	Apparel
Founded	2006
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California, United States
Key people	Sophia Amoruso, founder and executive chairman Robert Ross, CFO Sheree Waterson, CEO
Products	Apparel, Accessories
Number of employees	200 est. (2014)
Website	NastyGal.com

Nasty Gal is an American retailer that specializes in fashion for young women. The company has more than 550,000 customers in over 60 countries. Founded by Sophia Amoruso in 2006, Nasty Gal was named “Fastest Growing Retailer” in 2012 by INC Magazine. Nasty Gal is based in Los Angeles. Amoruso originally began selling vintage clothes from her eBay account, and later switched to sell its own label of clothes, on her own website.

Sophia Amoruso launched an ebay store based in San Francisco, selling old pieces of clothing. The store was named Nasty Gal Vintage, the name being inspired by Betty Davis, ex-wife of Miles Davis. On their website, the company calls Davis "the patron saint of badass women ... complete with lamé platform thigh-high boots." The eBay store sold vintage fashion that Amoruso would source at secondhand stores; one such find, a Chanel jacket she purchased at a Salvation Army store for $8, she sold for more than $1,000.

As part of the process of founding Nasty Gal, Amoruso was initially handling everything from buying merchandise to photographing the pieces and writing the products' descriptions. Amoruso primarily used MySpace to communicate with her customers and by 2007, had built up a following of 60,000 friends on that platform. In June 2008, Amoruso moved Nasty Gal Vintage off of eBay and onto its own destination site, www.nastygal.com. Nasty Gal’s first hire was through Craigslist of Christina Ferruci. Ferucci functioned as Nasty Gal’s Senior Buyer and Buying Director for more than six years. Ferrucci left Nasty Gal in November 2014.

In 2009, Nasty Gal moved into its first warehouse space in Berkeley, California; the company’s growth drove its next move shortly afterwards to a 7,500-square-foot warehouse in Emeryville, California. Amoruso has emphasized in interviews the importance of social media to Nasty Gal’s growth.