Couture Society

Once upon a time there was this kid. Her dad's in television, it's the late 80's and she's three or so, poking around on their family computer, which is totally rare back then, or trying to sell things to her relatives from behind the bar in the basement when they visited their grandparents in New York. My kind of girl. Lauren was a product of the Disney princess generation, compulsively watching the Little Mermaid and putting on shows in her Connecticut living room: recitals, plays, performances, dancing to Michael Jackson's Off the Wall album—anything for an audience really, anything to be where the people are. And she was secretly curious, which gave her a competitive edge. Yeah she played dress up and Barbie dolls but she also played video games and she always had her nose in the computer. It's funny how these things add up down the road. Truthfully, it wasn't until years later over coffee with a friend, when she first told her story—how a girl fought conventional wisdom, beat the odds stacked against her, and launched an online retail juggernaut out of her parents house—that she realized exactly how early it all began: sales, entertainment, determination…she was doing all that before elementary school.

So somewhere around that time her father, Ted, moves the family down to Atlanta where another guy named Ted's made a name for himself in television; and they settle in the suburbs and quickly adapt to this ever-expanding, southern city covered in trees. The girls go to school there; only Lauren hates school and fights her parents at absolutely every turn for the next 10 years…all the way through high school. And those years were anything but golden.

She was overweight and overlooked and generally miserable, especially in the classroom. Now don't get me wrong. She was a bright kid and excelled at projects and assignments where she could be creative. Otherwise, she just didn't try. But she always said she felt like she was supposed to do something big—like she was made for something bigger. And of course, like any other middle school girl in the 90's, she assumed that calling was to be a pop singer… Michael, Madonna, and Mariah had all made that abundantly obvious. And a business trip with Dad to the West Coast confirmed her suspicions. His company was taping a new show with a young, undiscovered talent named Ryan Seacrest, whose energy was contagious to say the least. So while she spent her days roaming the sets and tagging along at the business dinners in LA, she began to see how creative people could succeed; and for the first time, began to believe she could fit in. Later she recalled that the time she spent on that trip with her dad was the most exciting time in her early life and instrumental in helping form her belief that there was, in fact, a magical place where smart, creative people were rewarded for being smart and creative. And she decided then, that one day she would go there.

Conveniently, for these vague, mesmerizing aspirations of succeeding in Hollywood—the land of palm trees and possibility—an education was rarely a pre-requisite. So, armed with that bullet-proof logic, and enticed by the lure of that golden glow just the other side of the rainbow, she resolved to do as little as possible in school to get by until she could quit indefinitely. Which is exactly what she did.

Luckily, before that happened, sometime during her Senior year, her anxious mother, knowing her lackluster resume, saw a chance to get her to do something—other than shopping at the mall or creating elaborate collages using an endless supply of magazine cutouts and shopping bags with the logos of her favorite stores—and signed her up for the yearbook staff. So here's this closet artist/pop culture addict who agrees against conventional wisdom that yearbook is a good decision for her social-standing; and get this, she absolutely eats it up. Forget basic copy and layout, within a few months, between Photoshop and premium blend coffee, she's into graphic design and building websites and all of a sudden she's found that missing medium that allows her to communicate thoroughly, and poke fun at pop-culture intelligently and with confidence. Only, in the real world, she's still insecure and basically terrified of the future—especially after realizing that it wasn't actually destiny that was calling her to follow Britney. But, on the bright side, now she had hope.