How Lisa Says Gah's Lisa Bühler Built One of the First Instagram Brands Out of Her Apartment

In our long-running series "How I'm Making It," we talk to people making a living in the fashion and beauty industries about how they broke in and found success.

San Francisco isn't quite considered a high-gloss fashion capital, but then again, it's home to Lisa Bühler, the former Nasty Gal buyer who built one of the industry's most ubiquitous Instagram brands. 

For the last seven years, Bühler has developed a retail business that's truly all her own, right there in the Bay Area. That business, of course, is none other than Lisa Says Gah, an e-commerce destination born out of Bühler's particular vision for quirky nostalgia.

What is "gah," exactly? In a recent profile on The Cut, Emilia Petrarca exquisitely describes it as "what you say when you turn a corner and gah! Look at that adorable little dog in a bow tie." In Bühler's case, "gah" was, maybe, not so philosophical: "Lisa Says Gah" was simply the name of her Instagram handle at the time of the retailer's launch, and it stuck. It's a fitting first chapter in the origin story of a brand that helped put social shopping on the map.

Lisa Says Gah formally entered the cybersphere in 2015, on the heels of Bühler's three-and-a-half-year stint at the fast-fashion-adjacent former brainchild of one Sophia Amoruso. Bühler's timing couldn't have been better. She was already proficiently Online™, having banked valuable experience at a rapidly growing e-commerce startup. She understood how to cater to the newly-lucrative millennial-aged consumer in a way that was at once aspirational and relatable. And she certainly didn't water down her whimsical, more-is-more aesthetic to better appease the Phoebe Philoheads.

By the time Instagram launched its in-app shopping feature a year later, Bühler had already secured an audience thanks, in no small part, to Lisa Says Gah's blooming presence on the platform. (Bühler's shrewd financial savvy certainly didn't hurt.) The business has grown immensely since that era, when Bühler spent her days running Lisa Says Gah from her apartment, on a website she set up herself on Squarespace. What's remained more constant, however, is the brand's commitment to speak for the Lisa Says Gah shopper: They're trend-driven, sure, but also unapologetic in their commitment to themselves, in all their eccentricities.

"Nostalgia is a big part of the reason I find fashion so romantic and dreamy and inspiring," Bühler explains from San Francisco, on one of those foggy San Francisco mornings. "But I also want to put it in a light that feels fresh. Both contradict each other, but they've become what the brand has stood for."

Ahead, Bühler shares how a supermodel-obsessed '90s kid in Southern California went on to create and now scale Lisa Says Gah, all without sacrificing her belief in what clothes, really, should be about.

Your in-house line goes up to a 3XL, and you've been vocal that you one day plan to launch a dedicated plus line. In your opinion, what are some of the largest hurdles facing true size inclusivity in the fashion space in 2021?

It's shocking that traditionally, large has been the largest size. I'm typically an extra-large, and I oddly never questioned that a lot of times. We didn't start to see the demand for it until a couple years ago, when we started asking our brands to comply. We also asked them for biodegradable packaging. Now that we have more influence, we can place larger orders, and in some cases, we'll force brands or make it more incentivizing for them to spend a little bit more. Cutting extra sizes sometimes requires the pattern to change, and that's just more cost added. I think that's probably why a lot of brands don't start off with plus sizing, but that's also why the fit really needs to be separate after a certain size. That's something we're working on.

It just comes down to being responsive and community-oriented, which we are. We're always evolving. Also, to go back to my point of the consumer driving change in the industry… That's a big part of it.

Lisa Says Gah is widely considered to be one of the first true "Instagram brands" that have helped transform the platform into one with enormous commercial power. What role has social media played in your business to date?

I often think, "Would Lisa Says Gah be where it is today without it?" I don't know. We had a lot of great press early on because we had kind of unorthodox photography. We did things that weren't done in the e-commerce business, and that was really attractive. It was relatable and imperfect, but still drew out this inspiring reaction of, "Ooh, I want to learn more." But it's allowed us to reach an audience consistently that would be hard to do with no advertising budget. We were able to grow organically because we could develop that reach through Instagram.

In early 2020, your staff more than doubled, you opened an office in LA and as of Q1 of this year, you charted growth by a full 300%. What has it been like scaling in such a critical time for the retail industry as a whole?

Well, online shopping spiked. We didn't have the burden of brick-and-mortar and we were already well set for e-commerce. A part of the reason we were able to scale, I think, is that values really changed during the pandemic. But also, as far as my business, we moved to a third-party warehouse. I opened an office in LA and ultimately let go of a lot of areas and let other people help more. There were days where I was shipping orders when it got really busy, of course, but I was able to step back and really think about how to grow the business. I was also a new mom at that time, so it was a lot of change at once. I had to delegate and figure out where I wanted the business to go.

If you were to go through the highlight reel of your career thus far, what big moments stand out to you?

When I was working in the showroom, I was representing this line called Wilt — they didn't even have a lookbook, so I went in over the weekend, brought a friend who was a model and another who was a photographer, and we put together this lookbook in a beautiful format. When my boss came in on Monday, I showed it to her and she just said, "Get in the car right now." We drove over to the designer's studio, and she just threw it on her desk. They were just so impressed. It was a great feeling, and I just did it for fun. That was when I realized I had more to offer than the assistant job I had. All these little moments add up to Lisa Says Gah. Everything informs the next move in a lot of ways, even if it's only seen in hindsight.

What's something that's exciting to you about the fashion industry right now?

There's a lot. Inclusivity has become such a welcome addition to the fashion industry. Fashion should be a happy thing, and it's been pretty destructive in a lot of ways. Being able to participate, but feel good about participating is really exciting. We're behind that mission, so it's great to see consumers and retailers moving in that direction.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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How Lisa Says Gah's Lisa Bühler Built One of the First Instagram Brands Out of Her Apartment
How Lisa Says Gah's Lisa Bühler Built One of the First Instagram Brands Out of Her Apartment

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