I ran into a story about Sophia Amoruso yesterday and found it interesting, so doing what I do, I dug in a little bit to see what I could find. Here are some things that I found relating to the naming of the brand Nasty Girl and also a newly published book by Amoruso, #GirlBoss .
I started on eBay in ’06, I was 22 and living in San Francisco, working in the lobby of an art school, checking student IDs.
I called the store Nasty Gal Vintage after a lady named Betty Davis. She was this really outspoken, super stylish, and sexy ex-runway model, who was married to Miles Davis at one point. Her music is really good, and she had an album and song called ‘Nasty Gal.‘ When I started selling stuff on eBay, I was more into music than fashion, and it wasn’t like, ‘What am I going to name this business that I will eventually be CEO of?’ It was more thinking, ‘Uh..what am I going to call an eBay store?’ I’d thought of stupid stuff like ‘I Heart Vintage’—thank God I didn’t go with that. ‘Nasty Gal’ was also somewhat of an ‘F you’—like, hey, if I can make this name work, then what I’m selling must be really good. It’s a slightly repellent name, but one that is a good litmus test for weeding people out. If you’re really freaked out by the business name, then you are going to suck working with us, and you’re probably not our customer.
So the long name of the company was a need for an eBay Store of Amoruso and I Heart Vintage was considered. Using her love for music, the Nasty Girl name came from a song title.
I left eBay cold turkey and launched the standalone website in June of 2008, and also hired my first employee, Christina.
She bought the domain nastygalvintage.com (nastygal.com was, at the time, a pornography site; she’s since purchased the domain name)
NastyGirlVintage.com was created 1/12/2007 and is owned by NastyGal.com today (I keep typing NastyGirl.com) . I was going to try and contact the past owner of NastyGal.com and see what they sold for, but I rarely get a reply when I ask those questions.
#GirlBoss
The title itself comes from this unknown Japanese film from the ’70s called Girl Boss Guerilla. It’s about these ransom-gathering Japanese girls who ride motorcycles, look amazing, and fight in puddles. It’s really campy, cool, glamorous, and totally lowbrow. The genre’s called Pinky Violence. There are these DVD box sets, the Pinky Violence collections. They’re all female revenge. I just love revenge films for some reason.
So the GirlBoss name came from the film Girl Boss Guerilla. The GirlBoss.com domain name was also previously owned and was purchased by Nasty Gal founder Amoruso.
Other domain names owned?
Remember that other considered name of the company? I Heart Vintage? Yep, it is owned by Nasty Gal Inc. in .com form! Remember that typo I kept typing why writing this article? Yep, they own NastyGirl.com also.
Nasty Girl Inc. owns a fairly small amount of domain names (about 50), but they are great and make sense covers! The one domain they should own but currently do not is NastyGals.com, a domain that was registered back in 1998. It would be a wise purchase as I’m sure it’s getting some NastyGal traffic.
Other domains owned include, the matching name of the new book GirlBoss.com, GirlBossFoundation.org (future?) GirlBoss.org (I couldn’t confirm GirlBossBook.com but the timing of the registration would point to somebody in her camp that registered it)
Shoe line with the created term “Shoe Cult” and matching domains ShoeCult.com, TheShoeCult.com and Shoe-Cult.com
More Domains:
Amoruso.com (her last name) (I couldn’t confirm she owns SophiaAmoruso.com)
SuperNasty.com
TheVintageStylest.com
NastyGalClothing.com | NastyGirlClothing.com
ShopNastyGal.com and several variations with the “shop” term in the domain.
Overall
I thought it was interesting and wanted to share how she came up with the name for the company, even though she was simply trying to name her eBay store! She and her team did a good job with domain names in general. I like hearing little stories like this as they often are not shared publicly. Sophia thankfully has been pretty open in several interviews and I was able to piece those together and bring it into the domain space to see how it relates.
That’s ballsy using the old porn domain, lol. Nice story, thanks for sharing.
She seems pretty edgy, so I thought it was fitting 🙂 no different than Dicks Sporting Goods buying Dicks.com I guess 🙂