#GIRLBOSS (13 page)

It also always causes me to raise an eyebrow when someone says he or she has been a consultant for the past few years, but can’t elaborate on that or put it into concrete accomplishments. It’s a mistake to try to bluff about your
experience because such posturing usually starts to crack after a few smart questions. But if you were legitimately freelancing, consulting, or running your own business for a while, that says a lot about you. As an entrepreneur, I have a ton of respect for anyone who’s willing to give working for themselves a go. Even if you eventually decided it wasn’t for you, this kind of experience can still make you stand out.

Interview No-No’s That May Doom You to Unemployment

• Chewing gum
  
• Bringing things with you—a beverage, a pet, a boyfriend, a child
  
• Leaning back in your chair and crossing your arms
  
• Staring at the floor, out the window, or at the interviewer’s boobs
  
• Picking your nose or your nails
  
• Having your phone even visible
  
• Having zero questions
  
• Asking so many questions that it seems like you’re interviewing the interviewer
  
• Not writing a thank-you e-mail or note—I especially love a handwritten note because to me, someone who knows to have good manners knows how to get what she wants in this world
  
• Dressing like you’re headed to a nightclub instead of a job interview
  
• As a female, thinking that you don’t have to wear a bra, even if you’re interviewing at a company with a name like Nasty Gal
  

So You Got a Job? Awesome! Now Keep It!

That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.

—Charles Bukowski

Nasty Gal is not a traditional nine-to-five company. Everyone here is very passionate about Nasty Gal and believes in what we’re doing. We work hard because we’re a bunch of #GIRLBOSSes (and some #DUDEBOSSes) and we know that we’re working on something that’s bigger than just us. If you’re looking for a job where you can show up, make no impact on the world, and watch a lot of cat videos, this is not the place for you. However, I do know an art school lobby in San Francisco that might be hiring. . . .

As a #GIRLBOSS is ambitious by nature, I’m going to assume that once you get a job, you want to do it well and eventually move up. And though every company is different, here are a few pointers on how to make that happen.

The Four Words Thou Shalt Never Mutter

You want to know what four words I probably hate the most? “That’s not my job.” Nasty Gal is not a place where these four words fly. At the end of the day, we’re all here for one reason and one reason only—to make the company succeed—and there will undoubtedly be a day (perhaps every day) when you will have to roll up your sleeves and dive in where you’re needed. When a company is growing quickly, there will be times when there are holes—there is a job that needs to be done, and there is no one there to do it.

A few years back, our warehouse manager gave his two weeks’ notice exactly two weeks before Black Friday. On Thanksgiving night, our creative director, merchandisers, girls from the buying team, me, and whomever else we were able to round up headed down there and shuffled around a dusty warehouse until 4:00
A.M
., scanning and reclassifying all of our inventory so we could ensure that the people who shopped with us on one of the most important retail days of the year actually got the clothes that they ordered. At 2:00
A.M
., as I was counting and recounting bustiers, I did not give a shit whether people were creative or whether they loved fashion—I was just thankful to have employees who were willing, even enthusiastic, to step up and work hard.

In an ideal world you’d never have to do things that are below your position, but this isn’t an ideal world and it’s never going to be. You have to understand that even a creative job isn’t just about being creative, but about doing the
work that needs to get done. The #GIRLBOSS who is willing to do a job that is below her—and above—is the one who stands out. Above, you ask? Yes. Sometimes you’ll find an opportunity to step in when your boss is out, or just swamped, and show your worth. You’re as smart as she is, anyway, so figure it out as you go and make it look like child’s play. It’s that attitude, and behavior, that will get you ahead.

God—and a Promotion—Is in the Details

Be a nice person at work. It doesn’t matter how talented you are; if you are a total terror to work with, no one will want to keep you around. And the worst kind of mean is selective mean—people who are nice to their boss and superiors, but completely rude to their peers or subordinates. If you are a habitual bitch to the front desk girl, the security guard, or even the Starbucks staff downstairs, that news will eventually make its way up the chain, and the top of the chain ain’t gonna like it.

Own up to your mistakes and apologize for them. Everyone will make a mistake at some point, and the sooner you can admit where you went wrong, the sooner you can start to fix it. Be honest with yourself about yourself and your abilities. Many people accept titles that are beyond their experience to only later find themselves up to their neck in problems they can’t solve, and too embarrassed to admit they weren’t qualified in the first place. And what’s the first rule about holes? If you’re in one, stop digging.

Boundaries, Found

Your boss is not your friend and if you’re the boss, your employees aren’t your friends. I learned this the hard way when I was out to dinner one night with someone who used to report to me. It was right after I bought the Porsche, and I was babbling on about how flashy it was, and how much of a cheese ball I sometimes felt like driving it. However, instead of listening as a friend, she took this honesty about my insecurities as an opportunity to insult, and said, “Well, you know, you’d better be careful, because people are saying ‘Oh, now I’m doing my job to pay for a Porsche.’” While I still don’t believe anyone but the person I was with had an issue with my auto purchase, it quickly had me bawling into my rosé. Yet it taught me a lesson: While it’s okay to be friends with my investor, it’s not okay to be friends with my direct reports. If you need someone to listen as you drag your psyche across the coals, find a friend or a therapist, but don’t do it with someone you’re expected to manage on a daily basis.

At a company like Nasty Gal, which seems very informal and where there are a lot of young people, the managerial lines can sometimes get blurry. If you treat your reports like your peers, your team won’t respect you further down the road when you have to play a trump card or put your foot down. I’ll go for drinks with people, I’ll dance at parties, but at the end of the day people know that when I give someone a deadline, it’s not up for discussion.

You Are Not a Special Snowflake

Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance.

—Joel Stein in
Time
magazine

From one speed demon to another, let me be straight with you: Slow your roll. You got a job, that’s great, but you need to get your hands dirty and spend time proving yourself before you ask for a raise or a promotion. Four months are not enough, and neither are eight. At the bare minimum, you need to be in your position for a year before you ask for a raise or title change. Even then, that’s if and only if you’ve been going above and beyond, doing work that’s outside your job description, and generally making yourself completely indispensable to your employer.

A lot of people in my generation don’t seem to get that you have to work your way up. An entry level job is precisely that—entry level—which means that you’re not going to be running the show or getting to work on the most fun and creative projects. I’ve heard so many people in their twenties complain about their jobs because they “have so much more to offer,” but first and foremost, you have to do the job that you’re there to do. I don’t care if filing invoices is
beneath you. If you don’t do it, who do you think is going to? Your boss? Nope. That’s why she hired
you
.

I know you’ve probably grown up with your parents telling you that you’re special every day for the past twenty years—it’s okay, my parents did too—but you still have to show up and work hard just like everybody else. If you’re a #GIRLBOSS, you should want to work harder than everybody else.

It takes a lot more than just knowing how to put an outfit together to succeed in the fashion industry, so more power to you if this is where you want to be; just don’t expect it to be an extended trip to the mall. And if you’re a cute girl expecting to just get by on her looks, go apply elsewhere. We’ve already got a ton of cute girls working at Nasty Gal, and they’re all busting ass.

The Firing Line

There is no way around it, and it doesn’t matter which side of the desk you’re on: Getting fired straight-up sucks. One of the many jobs I was fired from was a sales associate job at a luxury shoe store in San Francisco. I was a crummy twenty-one-year-old—not as dirty as I had been, but still not completely clean—hawking shoes by Maison Martin Margiela, Miu Miu, and Dries van Noten with quadruple-digit price tags. At that time I stayed out all night and showed up to work semi-showered, wearing the same red polyester flares day after day as I sold
Prada pumps to rich ladies. I didn’t care about Prada and I didn’t get that I was supposed to pretend. As I write this, I am in love with a particular pair of Prada shoes that I am considering buying, so oh how times have changed, but back then I was indignant about it—“Who is spending
this
kind of money on shoes?”

I made $12 an hour with no commission as these women from Pacific Heights (a pretty chichi neighborhood in San Francisco) would come in and I would have to smile and be all like “
Hiiiiiiiiiii
, how are
youuuuuu
? Let me know if there’s anything I can help you
withhhh
,” while inside I was thinking,
I hate you
. The store made the salespeople wear the shoes too, so I had a pair of Dries van Noten pumps that were so scuffed they could have been vintage. They weren’t special to me, so I wore them to work and burrito shops alike. On Sundays I worked by myself, and was given thirty minutes to close the store for my lunch break. Time came, I flipped the sign on the door, locked up, and walked down the street to order a hamburger. The burger took forever and I was hungry. This, coupled with my pathetic sense of time, caused me to be super late to open the store back up. When you make $12 an hour and you’re spending $8 on a burger, you had damn well better make it count.

When I finally made it back to the store well past my thirty-minute lunch break, the owner was there. I’d been perpetually late, perpetually grimy, and I’m sure that this had been a long time coming. She collected my key, gave me my final paycheck, and sent me on my way. This was actually the
last time that I was fired. Seven years later, I can’t quit and no one can fire me.

Telling Someone “You’re Fired”

Generally I like other people to fire, because it’s always a lousy task.

—Donald Trump

Sadly, it wasn’t too long after I took Nasty Gal off eBay that I had to fire someone for the first time. When I first hired someone to oversee shipping, the business was still just Christina and me. We were twenty-two-year-olds managing a grown man who, on his third day of work, asked if he could leave early because it was “grocery day” for his family. Sweet, but no. It was also apparent that he had never used a computer before. He was completely stumped when a box popped up on the screen. “It says ‘Norton AntiVirus.’ What do I do?” Christina and I both screamed, “Oh my God, just click the ‘X’!” I started to panic, because I had hired this guy to make my life easier and it was clear that this was not going to be the case at all.

We also hired a copywriter who, in my weaker moments, I started to think was a spy sent by a competitor to sabotage the business from the inside—because there was no way in hell his mistakes could be for real. Time after time, I would say, “Please use spell-check and stop having so many typos,” but then everything he wrote looked like it had been
done by my poodle who was pecking at the keyboard with her nose.

I knew he had to go, and it was tortuous for me. I read up on all the legal responsibilities of firing someone, and went through all the different scenarios in my head—if he said this, I was going to say that; if he asked that, I was going to explain it like this. When I finally, practically hyperventilating, sat him down and told him we were letting him go, he was totally calm about it. “Okay.” He shrugged. “No problem.” And he left.

The harsh truth is that not everyone you hire is going to work out. It’s impossible to know everything about a person’s talent, judgment, and character without actually working with him or her. In many cases, the people who don’t work out are people about whom I had second thoughts from day one. However, sometimes it is simply a matter of a fast-growing company growing faster than the people inside it. The person who was right for the job a year ago might not be right for the job a year from now. Don’t get me wrong: I’m loyal to every person I’ve hired. But my loyalty lies with the greater business, which means the hundreds of others whose jobs could be at stake if we have the wrong person in the wrong role. I know this sounds harsh, but it’s that level of objectivity that leaders need to have. And leading is, after all, what I’m ultimately here to do.

If someone who is working for you keeps screwing up, make sure you talk to her about it. There’s always the slight
off chance that maybe that employee doesn’t know that she is doing anything wrong and it’s something that she can easily fix. Everyone should be given the opportunity to improve. But if you think you’re going to have to fire someone, start documenting everything. People who get fired love to say shit like, “The only reason I got fired was because that bitch didn’t like me.” Chances are that if you’re ready to fire someone, you probably don’t like that person. And that’s okay. Just keep your cool and be professional, because it’s not about that. It’s because someone sucks that you have to do this, not because you suck. If your company has a human resources department, make sure that they’re aware of what’s going on. If you can write someone up, write someone up.