I Changed My Career By Launching A Resale Business
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Life Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Business, Writing

There goes my pop careening down the aisles of a T.J. Maxx, clutching a pair of silver stilettos in one hand and a delicate pair of heels adorned with silk butterflies in the other. They have Prada! Dolce & Gabbana! He was fresh out of the shower, but he had bits of hay in his hair from the thoroughbreds he groomed and loved. My pop broke Triple Crown babies for million-dollar trainers. But there he was, beaming. Expensive heels in calloused hands.

On the weekends, we watched Video Fashion Weekly and pored through the latest issues of InStyle and Elle. Market research, I said. He nodded, schooled himself on cheetah prints and the business of finery. My pop considered The Gap the height of sartorial sophistication, caring for his meager collection of flannels and button-downs like small children.

He was saving up for a leather Kenneth Cole jacket when I told him to think big. We were about to hit Woodbury Commons and we needed to be versed in all things Chanel, Prada, and Gucci. We had a business to run.

In the late 90s, I decided I’d rather have surgery without anesthesia than waste another day in banking. I’d spent three years at two investment banks and while I rose up through the ranks — unusual for an analyst, especially if you were a woman — I had issues with sexual harassment, authority, Ivy League trust-funders, PowerPoint, and stockings. These were the halcyon days before Casual Fridays, where motherfuckers still wore suspenders and Cerruti suits, and I’d have to sardine myself into a subway car. In a gabardine skirt suit. In 101-degree heat.

I hated everyone and let them know it on a daily basis by spending forty-five minutes at Starbucks and humiliating mangy men until their hands shook.

HI, BOB! ARE YOU SEXUALLY HARASSING LISA AGAIN BECAUSE YOUR WIFE REALIZED SHE MARRIED A BAG OF SHIT? POOR BOB! I tormented Bob (not his real name) until the men on the floor tormented Bob and Bob asked HR to move him to a different department. HR wanted to discuss my “aggressive behavior.” Lisa and I became close for six months until I learned I’d been accepted to Columbia’s MFA program and would leave my days of stock options and suits behind.

I’ve never been china, the kind of woman who could slide on a pair of hose with ease. More like I tore three of them out of the pack, and then I’d get reprimanded for wearing long skirts and bare feet in heels and I might have called my boss a bitch, which made me think I had to consider a new career path. But this was the time of the paper resume and myopic recruiters, and I kept getting interviews at outfits like Merrill Lynch where the selling point was a shower installed on the office floor.

Did I mention these were two-day interviews over a weekend? I had to bring a bagged lunch, which I couldn’t eat during the interview but could snarf bites of in between inquisition sessions where associates and managing directors said vahz instead of vase.

I wanted to murder my recruiter with common household appliances.

Since I considered everyone older than me a complacent idiot, I created experience where none existed. Back then, I considered myself hip — I had an AOL account and a buddy list when my peers thought the internet was a pedophile’s paradise. I signed up for this new site, eBay, and sold clothes I’d scored at sample sales. It occurred to me not every city was like New York. A woman confessed to traveling across state lines to find a Saks or Nordstrom. It was the late 90s — people were flush and women were hungry for the pretty things they saw in fashion magazines.

There was no Google or Rent The Runway or Saks.com. There was, however, a search engine called “Excite.”

An idea was born. My ticket out of pantyhose purgatory was a cringeworthy html website, weeks of filing LLC paperwork, and sordid credit card machine applications (yes, people would email me their credit card information and I had to process their orders via a hand-held machine, which introduced all sorts of fraud-related hijinks). I launched “The Collection,” a website that offered high-end designer clothing at rock-bottom prices. The site might have been royal blue with cream font, but I was proud and ordered a pile of glossy business cards with orchids printed on the background.

I was a hip one, I tell you.

My pop and I lived in a small apartment perched over a barn. Our home had become refuge to dozens of shoe boxes and garment bags, beaded gowns and cinched skirts. I styled and photographed all the wears on a mannequin, and can I tell you I felt more professional in those moments when I came home from my Morgan Stanley job and sifted through the orders that had come in. How my pop and I screamed when the bidding on eBay on a dress we purchased for fifty bucks soared into the four figures?

To quote Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, we had a time. Cue 10,000 Maniacs’ “These Are Days” for the five Gen-Xers in the cheap seats.

The little resale shop that could captured the attention of the burgeoning Oxygen network, who ended up making the trip out to Long Island to interview the young entrepreneur selling high fashion out of a barn. The segment caught the attention of the wife of my future boss — my first pivot away from a career in banking.

I interviewed for at a luxury goods dot.com, and although the salary and benefits paled in comparison, everyone at my new job was young, foxy, and stylish. A Vogue vibe minus the foolery. Editors chattered in Italian in the hallways. We went out to bars in the Meatpacking District. Everyone used Macs and we wore what we wanted. Venture money paid for catered lunches and town cars, and soon I shuttered my little shop for a life seemingly lived in sepia.

I never considered how much this business bonded me and my pop. My life was simple and clean. But when I moved out of the barn and into an apartment in Morningside Heights and switched up red wine in Columbia bars for cocaine on the Lower East Side, the chasm between us widened and we would never be as close again. It never occurred to me, until now, that those years spent in Long Island with my pop was when I was most happy. And it would take over a decade to unravel my obsession with status and things to fill a gaping hole that was forever bottomless.

A hole so dark no light could squeak through.