#Girlboss Review

Have you read #GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso yet? Once I started reading the book, I couldn’t put it down…

Sophia Amoruso turned her hobby of selling vintage clothing on eBay into Nasty Gal, a $100 million+ online fashion retailer with more than 350 employees in just 8 years.

The first thing Sophia Amoruso sold online wasn’t fashion – it was a stolen book. She spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft, and dumpster diving. By twenty-two, she had resigned herself to employment, but was still broke, directionless, and working a mediocre day job.

But when Sophia started Nasty Gal, she clearly understood her ideal target customer, how to market and listen to her, and how to sell…even if she didn’t realize it at the time! Here’s why I say this along with excerpts from the book:

-Simple market research: she started buying units of 6, testing the waters to see what sold and what didn’t. If it sold, they learned. If it didn’t sell, they learned.

-if a style worked really well, she took note and tried to replicate that success. If a style was bad, it was dead to them. Pretty simple guidelines, but keeping it simple has always been part of the Nasty Gal DNA.

-Understood her online target customer: her target customers were the coolest girls looking for either vintage or small designers at good prices, styled in a way no one had seen before.

-Reality checks: how much money they brought home was a direct result of how hard and how smart they worked. “You’re only as good as your next month.”

-Never stopped evolving: when you begin with the finish line in mind, you miss all the fun stuff along the way. The better approach is to tweak and grow, tweak and grow. I call it the incremental potential.

-Rule #1: how to get free marketing? Just do a good job. Through the styling, photography, and voice of the brand, Nasty Gal was an exciting place to shop, but if our customers were equally as stoked when they were holding one of our products in their hands, then that excitement lived and died on the Internet.

-Rule #2: keep your promises. Customers will become not only loyal, but also evangelical. They’ll come back again and again, and share the excitement with their friends – frequently on the Internet. It was the kind of natural word-of-mouth that can’t be bought.

-Never stop evaluating: Today, our team is constantly working together to examine what has made us successful, what of that we want to keep around, and what newness we can introduce to evolve the brand. We then have to communicate that and share it.

-Knows her brand: The heartbeat of nasty gal doesn’t exist in one style, trend, or article of clothing. It’s in the way we talk, the way we carry ourselves, and the way we see the world. If you scroll through Nasty Gal photos from the early days, this is obvious: The styles have changed, but the attitude is the same.

Okay – this was to give you a ‘taste’ of what you’ll read/learn in the book #GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso. Now, click the image below to go buy it!

Lasting words by Sophia…that every one who owns a business or is thinking about starting a business or blog needs to read:

“The world loves to tell you how difficult things are, and the world’s not exaggerating. And that’s a real bummer. But, here’s the real shit: you can’t have it all, and nothing comes easy. You will make sacrifices and compromises, get let down and let other people down, fail and start over, break some hearts, take some names, and learn to pick up and continue when your own heart gets broken, but difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and out of the bajillions of things in this universe that you can’t control, what you can control is how hard you try, and if or when to pack it in.”

Now go put on your #GIRLBOSS panties, buy the book (if you haven’t already) and start making more money! Xo

 

Cover Image via The Coveteur