Down And Backup

Nasty Gal’s SOPHIA AMORUSO was a hotshot media darling with a booming company and a Netflix series based on her life—until it all collapsed at once. Now with her new company, GIRLBOSS, she’s doing everything differently.

- Liz Brody

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.

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.