Naughty in Name Only

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Sophia Amoruso turned an eBay store selling fashion finds into Nasty Gal, a Web retailer with nearly $100 million in sales.

LOS ANGELES â€" If ever there were a Cinderella of tech, Sophia Amoruso might be it.

Nasty Gal is “the fastest-growing retailer in the country,” its founder, Sophia Amoruso, says.

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 â€" 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 â€" 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 â€" 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.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 25, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Naughty in Name Only.