My first real job out of college was assistant buyer for a small contemporary store based in New York, NY.  They boutique retailer that sells men's and women's contemporary apparel, shoes, and accessories.  They have 2 locations in New York City and one in the Gansevoort Hotel in Miami.  The buying team consisted of 5 people - 2 buyers, 2 assistant buyers, and 1 GMM.  I was responsible for keeping my buyer organized and making sure she had all of the information she needed to write her orders.  Essentially, I became a semi-profesional photographer (semi because how professional can you really get with a point and shoot digital camera?) as I took pictures of everything she liked in market and circled them on linesheets.  My buyer liked to shop the entire market before placing any orders, so we always placed orders from the office and never at the showroom or tradeshow.  So, it was super important that the pictures she later referenced to place her orders were labelled correctly.  Since one of our categories was denim and practically all denim looks the same on point and shoot digitical camera pictures, mistakes were made.  Linesheets didn't help much with denim either, since every wash is called "indigo" or "carribean" or "moonlight" - I mean I know it's all part of marketing and sales, but buyers who don't work with the line everyday will not know know which washes are what.  So basically, not only did the actual task of labeling the pictures suck, but sometimes she would order the wrong thing because of me (at which point we then played the e-mail blame game).

Then there were also those times she would go to LA Market (which apparently I was too lowly to attend with her - ok the real reason is that it's expensive).  When she got back, there would be something close to a thousand images that needed to be downloaded, labeled, and organized... in 5 days, because orders were due the following week.  The best part was after I finished labeling everything, designers would make changes to prices, colors, fabrication, or delivery windows.  Sometimes they would let us know as soon as these changes were made, but most of the time they would tell us after we submitted the order.  And then we'd take another couple of days to talk through e-mail where the sales rep tries to sell you something you don't want so that the dollar amount rolls up to the same amount as it did with the style they are no longer making.  Funny how fashion is predictable in that sense, isn't it?

So one day, while doing my aggressive walk dodging street vendors from Chinatown to the office, I said to myself, "if my company pays me to do this full-time, then every boutique retailer probably has at least one person just like me doing the same exact thing.  I'm not alone!"  Then I thought, "why doesn't someone just put all of this stuff online? Like an amazon.com but for wholesale fashion" 

Then I became obsessed.  I would go to work everday and think, "if my idea existed, I would be doing way more interesting things like looking for new designers" but instead I continued to label pictures and make order templates and talk to vendors about style/price/delivery changes and follow up on shipments and all of that.  After work, I spent my time researching the concept, sure that something already existed.  Sure, a few things existed, but nothing that quite matched my vision.

So from there, as an English Literature major with no technology background, I began my 10 month journey to create Mona Lisa Style.