With Girlboss, Sophia Amoruso Is Using Past Failures to Fuel Her Latest Success
During the spring of 2017, the world was getting nasty toward Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso. It wasn’t a treatment she was used to. Until then, she’d been an entrepreneurial darling: the It-girl founder of a booming clothing retailer, frequent subject of magazine covers (including Entrepreneur’s: January 2013), regular headliner of conferences and author of a best-selling memoir. And then, on April 21, the TV version of Sophia streamed out to 130 million Netflix members. It was a comedy called Girlboss, based on her book -- a loose retelling of Amoruso’s life (“real loose,” the opening credits stress), in which a Dumpster-diving college dropout launches her fashion empire from an eBay store at only 22.
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The series, frankly, wasn’t very good. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that, simultaneously, in a rather spectacular back-assward feat of timing, the real Sophia, 33, was out of work, having sold the company she was celebrated for after it filed for bankruptcy amid a pile-on of troubles. The crisscross of Sophia narratives was catnip to critics, who suggested Amoruso was a narcissist and wrote headlines like “Girlboss is a feminist fraud.”
As if that weren’t enough, on top of the dueling Sophias was a third reality: Amoruso had already launched a whole new company she was beyond excited about, for better or worse, called Girlboss. It was, she says of the misaligned stars, a total “mind fuck.” It was also an entrepreneur’s nightmare: a seemingly inescapable failure.
But almost nothing is inescapable.
not the book, not the TV series, but the the thing that now defines Amoruso’s days -- officially began: In the spring of 2016, Amoruso asked to meet with Ali Wyatt. At the time, Amoruso was still riding high at Nasty Gal, which had 300 employees and a net annual revenue of $85 million; was about to estimate her personal net worth at $280 million. Her book had spent 18 weeks on best-seller list, and Netflix had recently announced the show based on the memoir, with Charlize Theron as executive producer and Kay Cannon, as writer. Amoruso was showing up everywhere in a swirl of descriptives, like and . And Wyatt, a consultant who’d held top positions at Refinery 29 and Goop, braced herself for the meeting. “I expected someone who would brag and peacock,” says Wyatt. But to Wyatt’s surprise, when the two sat down to talk at La Pecora Bianca in New York City, Amoruso opened up her journal and started taking notes. “She was incredibly disarming in how honest she was, so self-deprecating,” says Wyatt. “And she wanted to learn.”
