Figure It Out Yourself

I sat at the table next to my brother, Hamish. It was the school holidays in 2005. I was fourteen, and he was two years younger.

It had been raining for most of the week in our little town. We were bored and in need of a holiday project.

"So, Nikki," Hamish said. He leaned forward, as if he were about to let me in on a conspiracy. "You know the internet?"

"Yeah..."

"You know we could, like, buy stuff and then sell it on the internet for more than we bought it for and make a little something called 'profit?'" He tapped his fingertips together like a tycoon, then pulled out a book he'd found at the library. It was all about selling stuff on a website called 'eBay.'

When my parents sent us to boarding school, we were normally handed a crisp fifty-dollar note on our first day of term. We were expected to make the money last for the entire ten weeks. Fifty dollars was generally enough to buy some snacks, toiletries, and stationery throughout the term, but nothing extravagant. "If you want more, go figure it out yourself," they'd said.

And so we did. Hamish and I started a little eBay business. You technically had to be over eighteen to be on the platform, but we lied about our age. We initially imported electronics from China, but quickly realized that electronics were a commodity on eBay. Competition was fierce, and profit margins were thin.

After about a year of testing various products with mediocre success, I eventually found a little t-shirt supplier in Hong Kong who could dropship shirts for us. I'd design the shirts in Photoshop, then we'd sell them on our eBay store. Once a sale came in, we'd pay the supplier to print the shirt and ship it to the customer. It was the perfect business for a couple of teens like us who couldn't keep physical stock in our small boarding school dormitories. Because my designs were unique and our fixed costs were so low, we had great margins. We were powersellers by the age of sixteen. eBay frequently invited us to powerseller conferences and various other events that we could never attend, lest they discover our true age.

The business was good for me. It was a creative project to focus on when the bullying got bad at school; a portal into a world where I wasn't an outsider. I could sell people something I'd created, and they'd thank me for it. I felt like I added value to someone else's life.

After a few years, I was making decent money for a schoolgirl. I had no living expenses, so I learned to save my money. I invested some of it in new projects that never got off the ground. Sometimes I'd go shopping on the weekend and drop a thousand dollars on clothes without blinking.

And that's how I found myself staring at my bulging closet one day. Wouldn't it be nice if I could swap all these clothes with other girls? I thought. You know, like everyone else in the boarding house does.

Then and there, the idea for 99dresses sprung into my mind and captured my imagination. The idea felt brilliant to me. It felt exciting and fun and unique. The day I finish my final high school exams, I'll make it happen, I decided.