Sarah Wilkinson spent two decades in fashion, from hand-drawing designs in 1996 New York to leading creative at ASOS, Nasty Gal, and Forever 21. She helped launch ASOS's first online store and got the brand on a Vogue cover in 2008, then moved to LA to build Nasty Gal's collection with collaborators like Courtney Love.
Hi, good evening. I think that's going to be a little bit boring after all that talk of sex. I thought I was kind of the badass one, but clearly I'm just the English prude in all of this. I'm Sarah Wilkinson. Thank you so much for coming out this evening to share and listen to these stories. It's been a really special night so far, and I've certainly learned a lot in, in row 2. I've been specializing in trend, brand, and creative direction for over 20 years, focusing mainly on millennials and Gen Z and Gen Y customers. I've been privileged enough to work for Forever 21, currently But before that, CK Jeans, Miss Selfridge, ASOS.com, and Nasty Gal. So I've been around a few years. I've been around the block. I have emigrated 3 times in my career. This time, obviously, I'm here in LA. But previously in my career, I emigrated the first time to New York. It was 1996, so quite a while back, and I moved to start a 6-month internship in— and I was living in Hell's Kitchen, and it was a pretty grim and bleak-looking Manhattan in those days. I was paid $175 a week cash, which obviously didn't go very far. Especially when my favorite things were clubbing, clothes, cocktails. I mainly survived on deli egg rolls with sweet and sour sauce and drank copious amounts of Starbucks coffee. We used to work really long hours in those days. We didn't have computers, believe it or not. So we would have to design everything by hand, sketched out and faxed to China page by page by page. And if the fax machine blew out a long "boop," which it did invariably, quite often you would have to start again and feed every single piece of paper through to factories in China where with some handwritten instruction they would have to tape of the artworks together and use those to recreate the designs. Let's just say that we worked hard, but we partied even harder. We were surviving on probably around about 4 hours sleep a night, and I definitely would have considered myself as a technophobe. I think I'd only had a mobile phone for around about a year. No scanners, no computer, no internet, no Google at that time. Can you imagine? And it was certainly very challenging to build fashion trends at that time, mainly just through editorial magazines and pulling bought samples. If you were to fast forward 10 years, 2000— 2006, I was working in London holding design manager at Miss Selfridge, and I still probably would have considered myself a technophobe. I mainly would put boards together by hand, taping them together on large pieces of foam core and keeping things really quite simple and very manual. I had a very interesting chance meeting with a guy called Robert Brady, who was Products and Trading Director at ASOS.com at the time. I was out in a wine bar on a Friday night, and it happened to be his birthday, and he was very tipsy. And he was extremely animated and determined about persuading me to come and join what was then known as as seen on screen. Back then, no one had an online fashion store. Topshop, H&M, and Zara, those guys probably opened their online stores maybe 2 years after that. So there wasn't a blueprint at all for an online fashion store. I thought he was crazy. I thought it was impossible. I didn't understand how we were going to get people to buy clothes from a computer screen? I mean, was it even cool? I mean, it kind of just looked like a catalog, but on a screen. I mean, how are we going to make that into a brand? How are we going to make it into something that people would really get excited about? I kind of laughed him off the barstool, but I did enjoy the rounds of drinks that he was buying me while he was coaxing me to try to come and work for him. Anyway, 4 months passed, and eventually he managed to persuade me to leave Miss Selfridge and come and join him to head up a groundbreaking online fashion store. That's when the real hard work started. I started recruiting, networking, pulling on all my contacts. Starting the entire design process from scratch, traveling maybe like 20 to 30 times a year all over the world, researching, putting trends together. It was kind of crazy times. But we started to make headway. And what broke it was really in 2008, we landed the front cover of Vogue. We got Georgia Jagger in a sequin zebra dress, and at last we felt like we'd made it. During that time, we launched ASOS White, ASOS Black, ASOS Salon, ASOS Africa, ASOS Marketplace, and we collaborated with some incredible talents, Patricia Fields, Markus Lupfer, Josh Gute, Michelle Rafferty, Steph Stephens, hundreds of people who came to our calling. We certainly spent a lot of time in the pub. Nick Robertson, CEO of ASOS, said that if the alcohol ever dried up at ASOS, then all the ideas would dry up with it. But anyway, we did have some good ideas in the pub. And it proved to be so because we grew head office staff within 6 years from 60 people head office to 2,500 people. And our sales jumped from 750K a week to £35 million a week. It was this media attention and success that roused Sophia Amoruso, a.k.a. Girlboss, to contact me directly on LinkedIn. She wanted me to come to LA and set up a fashion label for her that would sit alongside her vintage gatherings. Nasty Gal Collection was born. I moved to LA. We started to collaborate with Courtney Love, iconic, original badass, and created some incredible collections. And I was there for 4 years until recently I left and joined Forever 21. I have just managed to achieve my hat trick. I am on my third startup in 10 years. I have just managed to, uh, do the brand and creative direction for a company called Riley Rose, which you may not have heard of just yet, um, but we launched our first store in Glendale Galleria last month. Um, it is a lifestyle and beauty brand and really is the next generation of brands, so highly integrated between the online and offline experience And it's really created for millennial girls, just like you. So please check it out, and the website will be launching on the 4th of November. What can I tell you about the last 20 years? It's been a whirlwind of events, and definitely, been— there's been some real personal challenges in there as well as professional challenges. But I want to leave you with a couple of things that I think have helped me through the last 20 years. I want to say to you all, be brave, dream the impossible dream. The impossible is possible. And be a badass. And have a good night. And cheers. I'll see you at the bar.
