NASTY GAL
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Nasty Gal The brand book
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Publisher’s Note I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing for the past few months — looking at old photographs, reading old letters me and my friends used to write to each other in secondary school, reminding friends and family about good old times. I do have many life regrets but I realised that I would never be the way I am without the people I meet. I am so blessed with the people around me – especially my girls, Anisha, Nadra & Emily. `I remember when I was sixteen, I would almost cry every day on my way to school, overthinking about the future, if I’m ever going to stay friends with my girls. It was soon our graduation, where all of us were going separate routes. Five years later, my best friend is still my best friend and I still meet my girls at least once a month. I haven’t showed enough gratitude to my girls for accepting me when no one did and always lending me a hand when I need them. Thank you for motivating and pushing me to do the things I thought I couldn’t achieve. Without the motivations, I wouldn’t have come this far. This brand book is about acceptance, inclusion, diversity, change and being yourself. Nasty Gal is a brand I would associate with confidence and girl power. It was founded and run by a girl who knew nothing about business or ecommerce, but succeeded with hardwork and passion.
Publisher Ash Alkhatib
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by gals
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for gals
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“Every ga confid
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al can be dent�
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Brand stylefresh vintage, subtle provocative
Brand personalitypower gal
Brand visionto keep consumers up to date with the latest trends and be the go-to destination when it comes to shopping online.
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Brand mission to make gals look and feel awesome.
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Driving confidence in gals
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based on what they wear.
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The OUTLAW An edgy, rebel girl. Nasty Gal is sexy, rock and roll and also down to earth. Their style is fresh vintage, and slightly provocative. Nasty Gal goal is to make gals look awesome. In order for gals to look awesome, they have to feel awesome.
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Nasty Gal wants to evoke confidence in gals. They want the gals to feel happy in their own skin and embrace their body types. Nasty Gal sells exclusively online so no one will be left out. “We may be rooted in Los Angeles, but we live everywhere online.�
The INNOCENT 17
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#NastyGalGang
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y r o t S d n Bra
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NASTY GAL started as an ebay shop in 2006
selling old vintage pieces of clothing. Named after an old Betty Davis track, it was called Nasty Gal Vintage. Founder Sophia Amoruso would find vintage clothing at a second-hand thrift store and resell it at the ebay store for a big profit – one such find, a Chanel jacket she purchased at a Goodwill 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 had built up a following of 60,000 friends on that platform by 2007. In June 2008, Amoruso moved Nasty Gal Vintage off of eBay and onto its own destination site, www. nastygal.com Nasty Gal lauched its own original label in 2012 which consist of limited edition styles. Its first Nasty Gal Fall/Winter 2012 Collection – Weird Science was debuted during New York Fashion Week. Since then, the company has continued to launch various collections timed to major fashion seasons throughout the year. They filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection in 2016 and was sold over to BooHoo Group, a UKbased online fashion retailer for $20 million. However, Nasty Gal is not over.
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THE FALL OF NASTY GAL —
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By 2012, Nasty Gal was a fashion world success story, growing from an Ebay store to nearly $100 million in sales in just six years. Founder Sophia Amoruso was the epitome of a #GIRLBOSS. But now Amoruso is gone and Nasty Gal is sold over to Boohoo.com.
So what went wrong at Nasty Gal?
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Reviews from Trustpilot
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Founder and Chief Executive Sophia Amoruso was Nasty Gal’s best model, embodying the Los Angeles company’s edgy and feminine aesthetic and attracting flurries of laudatory coverage with her rags-toriches story. However, the downfall of the brand all started when Amoruso stepped down as CEO to work on her best seller book #GirlBoss.
2015 saw the first of several lawsuits filed against Nasty Gal by former employees of the company, who claimed they had their employment terminated after becoming pregnant. Another employee claimed they were let go while suffering from advanced kidney failure, and that the company allowed her healthcare coverage to lapse, “Nasty Gal were meaning she was unable trying too hard to afford medication. Many the cases have since to make a profit, of been settled out of court.
but result in loss because of their lack of business thinking.”
The brand care were neglected, and too many orders were being made than what they could sell. The company went out of the brand image to woo more customers hence losing the interest of their loyal customers. The quality of the clothings sold were also lacking in quality due to the purchasing of cheap materials. Nasty Gal were trying too hard to make a profit, but result in loss because of their lack of business thinking. The brand was focusing more on the creative side rather than the business aspect of the company. This then led to lack of employee care.
Amoruso started acting like a celebrity rather than a CEO once her book got publictions. She was neglecting her company.
While the company began to internally implode, with multiple employees quitting and the struggle to find new senior staff, industry insiders began to gossip about Nasty Gal’s longevity. Sales were down, expenses for brand promotion and expansion were up, and the company was struggling to secure capital or find a wealthy buyer. Lucky for them, thanks to their loyal customers and distinctive style, BooHoo Group were interested in buying the brand.
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Sophia Amoruso, #GirlBoss author and founder of Nasty Gal, reflected on her past in an interview with Fast Company: “Look, I was dumb. Half the people in this office wouldn’t have taken me seriously seven years ago. To my surprise and everyone else’s, I’ve come out the other side more self-aware, selfcritical, and able to appreciate what I have.” Yes, Amoruso may have made lots of mistakes at the beginning of her career, but she says if she knew how difficult starting a company the size of Nasty Gal would be, she might never have taken the risk. The Takeaway: Embrace the determination that comes with naïveté.
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Sophia Amoruso is the founder of Nasty Gal, an eBay store she launched in 2006 at the age of 22. While the company experienced early rapid growth by tapping the powerful social media channels of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Amoruso stepped down in January 2015, distancing herself to focus instead on her #Girlboss media platform. Having moved her business away from eBay in 2008, establishing Nasty Gal as an independent e-tailer, in 2014 Amoruso published her memoir titled #Girlboss — which was later adapted into a Netflix series in 2017.
SOPHIA AMORUSO Sophia Amoruso, #GirlBoss author and founder of Nasty Gal, reflected on her past in an interview with Fast Company: “Look, I was dumb. Half the people in this office wouldn’t have taken me seriously seven years ago. To my surprise and everyone else’s, I’ve come out the other side more self-aware, self-critical, and able to appreciate what I have.” Yes, Amoruso may have made lots of mistakes at the beginning of her career, but she says if she knew how difficult starting a company the size of Nasty Gal would be, she might never have taken the risk.
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“Confidence is more attractive than anything you could put on your body� - Sophia Amoruso
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#Girlboss 2014
Nasty Galaxy 2016
The Girlboss Workbook 2017
Amoruso have since started her new brand, Girlboss Media, for women redefining success on their own terms. Girlboss Media was born from the book that inspired a generation of women to take action in their own lives. In May of 2014, Sophia’s book #GIRLBOSS skyrocketed onto the New York Times Bestseller list and stayed there—for nearly 20 weeks. Netflix has since adapted the story as a scripted comedy created and written by Kay Cannon. Today, they have a small but brilliant team of editors, creatives, and digital media professionals working to build something that’s never been built before.
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GIRLBOSS Netflix series
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REVIVAL Back on their feet.
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Boohoo has confirmed it has bought the intellectual property rights and customer data bases for US etailer Nasty Gal for $20m (£16m). The Manchester-based business was waiting on court approval for the acquisition, which has now been granted. The deal will complete on 28 February. Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane, joint CEOs of Boohoo, said: “[Nasty Gal] represents an exciting opportunity to accelerate our international offering and inspire an evergrowing range of young customers in the US and around the world.” Nasty Gal delivered net revenue of $77.1m (£62.7m) in the year to 1 February 2016. This included revenue from vintage clothing and third-party brands, which are excluded from the sale. The company made a net loss after tax of $21m (£17m) after operating costs. In December Boohoo acquired 66% of young fashion brand PrettyLittleThing for £3.3m.
In spite of Boohoo.com recent acquisitions of Nasty Gal and PrettyLittleThings, the fashion company aims to continue operating its brands as separate entities and ensure each brand retains its core identity.
“We have three creative teams, three buying teams. They all have their own designers and marketing so we keep the labels all very separate,” said Kane to Drapers. “The only thing that’s combined is the back end, warehousing and customer service. We don’t want to pool resources from any of the brands. The customer doesn’t know they are all under our umbrella – like they don’t know that Pull & Bear and Zara are both owned by Inditex.” Kane stresses that there is also a difference in each of the brands’ target customers, which is another reason why Boohoo strives to keep the brands separate from each other. “Boohoo is for a younger shopper. Nasty Gal is a bit older, vintage inspired and more edgy. PrettyLittleThing is full on dressing up and sassy.” In order to maintain Nasty Gal’s brand authenticity, Boohoo has spilt its brand team across the UK and Los Angeles. Following Boohoo’s acquisition of Nasty Gal, the Manchester-based fashion company has begun to trial the label’s presence in the UK by offering approximately 1,200 pieces online. “It largely has a US following but we’re testing the market here now,” said Kane, who added that the brand already has some fans over in the UK. At the same time, Boohoo is busy trying to lift Nasty Gal to its former glory in the US while boosting the brand’s presences across the country.
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COMPET 36
TITORS 37
missguided
- forward thinking online fashion
Missguided is a bold, straight talking and forward thinking fashion brand inspired by real life that aims to do exactly that. Everything they create is informed by their customer along with global influences like social media, street style, and popular culture, creating a destination that delivers and encompasses everything it means to be a girl on the go in the world today.
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Nitin Passi founded Missguided, the U.K. based fast fashion retailer, at the height of the 2008 recession -- an awfully good time to launch a valuefocused retail venture online. (Gilt Groupe and the Outnet took off the same year.) Now, five years after launch, Missguided has grown into an $80 million dollar business rapidly expanding beyond its Brit borders, first to the U.S., with plans for France, Germany and Sweden to follow in 2015. Yet Passi had very little business experience when he launched the site on his own. So how did he do it? We hopped on the phone with Passi to get the full story, learning about his early mistakes in marketing and how he developed one of the fastest supply chains in the business. It was around 2008, so just when the recession hit, and the only headline you’d see in the media about any growth was online, so that made Passi start looking online. “I didn’t want to do the age demographic that I was doing when I was working with my father because it was a little bit older, and I didn’t really get it. Younger fashion, I thought there was a bigger demand for it and fewer people were doing it.” sais Passi. “Asos was doing it at that time and they were having great results, so I thought I’d give it a go. I also had better contacts with the younger fashion world. So I got a loan off my father for 50,000 pounds back in 2008, and in March 2009 we launched the website.”
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asos
- discover fashion online
ASOS the most famous fashion e-commerce among the twentysomethings was founded in 2000 and its profits has grown from ÂŁ1.7m to ÂŁ63.7m and with active customers that hit 12.4m in 2016.
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The product offer is a combination of their own-label and a selection of famous third party brands. On Asos 4000 new styles are launched each week and it currenlty stocks over 85.000 product lines.
ASOS launched in 2000 (originally as “As Seen on Screen”) at the dawn of the new millennium. It was a small operation with big ambition. From emulating celebrity fashion a decade ago, today it’s setting trends – selling more than 850 labels. So how did this tiny start-up with just three employees become the U.K.’s leading fashion site? Arguably, the reasons are many: it offers something for everyone – men and women; big, small, slim, curvy and pregnant. Its prices are reasonable and accessible. Its clothes have an (eco) conscience – organic, fair trade and faux fur. Its site is easy to navigate and it’s painless (and free) to return items. ASOS is well on its way to establishing itself as a designer brand, not just an online “store.” Its own-label creations are worn by such high-profile fashionistas as Rihanna, Kate Hudson, Taylor Swift and Malia Obama. It’s a smart strategy, actually. Rather than pursue traditional advertising, ASOS recently provided dresses to Obama’s daughters; their fashion sense is developing and fashion magazines and blogs are interested in knowing – and publishing – what they wear. The publicity was free for ASOS and drove huge interest in the brand. ASOS is fluent in the language of its millennial buyers. The company has processes to deeply probe into and understand millennial thinking and behavior. ASOS’ greatest source of customer insight and innovation is arguably its own people. The company demonstrates distributed leadership in action. Every employee (many millennials themselves) is expected – and empowered – to conceive and create meaningful products, services and processes that speak to its twenty-something customers.
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Every gal wants to look good but it surely sucks when you see something you like, and the item of clothing don’t even come in your size. #nastygaldiversed caters to all size ranges for people of big or small body types. This is to ensure that every gal can wear our clothes and feel confident in it. Nasty Gal do not believe in one-size-fits-all clothing. Hence, a new line of clothes that fits petite and plus-size body is introduced.
#nastygaldiversed Every gal can feel confident
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no one left out
INCLU
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USION.
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all shapes and sizes
DIVER
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RSITY.
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for good
CHAN
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NGE.
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LOOKBOOK
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Minimal with a BANG! A curated set of looks to give an idea of #nastygaldiversed
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“I ain’t no a nasty g
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othing but gal now�
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nastygal.com
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