FAB FINDS FROM EBAY
Amanda Miller’s job with the online seller is perfect for a globe-trotting style expert who shopped the site for years
Even before she earned the title of global communications senior manager at eBay, Amanda Miller’s worldview was more international than provincial.
The 34-year-old native of New York City was raised by her father, a lawyer, and her mother, a publicist for a luxury jewelry line, on the Upper East Side, where at the time, Manhattan’s interior design aesthetic was chintz and wallpaper that matched the couch and the drapes. “Mario Buatta, the style of Dorothy Draper, Billy Baldwin, an abundance of color, no — Technicolor,” Miller said.
This was the beginning of Miller’s journey into style. “My mom would bring home piles of jewelry, and I was accustomed to piles of jewelry in the house,” she said. “I viewed it as a form of art.” It followed, she said, that clothing and accessories are art, too. “I think it should be displayed,” she said. “You should see it.”
After graduating from Vassar College, Miller interned at French Vogue in Paris and worked in public relations for a luxury brands firm before moving west in 2009 to work for a company she had been shopping with for 10 years online — eBay.
Miller’s work has taken her abroad, experiences that have honed her personal aesthetic, which she calls “Technicolor global chic.” To walk into her Pacific Heights apartment in San Francisco is to walk into a
“I believe in wearing something with a provenance. It had a life … with someone else. It has another life with me.” Amanda Miller
world rich in colorful and textural treasures, acquired with a few taps on a keyboard.
Her chandeliers and lamps? EBay. The opulent Art Decostyle Chinese Nichols rugs on her floors? EBay. The furniture in her den? Purchased from a seller in Egypt on eBay. A taxidermied peacock on a pedestal? A seller in Visalia, on eBay. Two closets with 200 pairs of almost-new shoes, including Manolo Blahniks? EBay. Racks of vintage Pucci, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Naeem Khan, Mary Katrantzou and various unsigned vintage pieces? EBay. Rigaud candles in cypress scent? EBay.
Just about the only thing she didn’t acquire through eBay was her boyfriend. Oops. Scratch that. They met on the job — at eBay.
“I don’t believe the best pieces of clothing are designer,” Miller said. “It’s what reflects your aesthetic, your mood. I believe in wearing something with a provenance. It had a life before you, with someone else. It has another life with me.”
The same is true for home furnishings, she said. Her kitchen tabletop is a mosaic of tiles and broken plates done in the pique assiette method. She collects old telegrams to frame and use as art or give as gifts.
“There’s more value to vintage — it’s unique, unlike what you might buy at the store, where there are multiples of a single item,” she said.
Her closets, she said, never get too full because of her “evolution in style,” by which she means “as you age and go through life stages, your style alters, and then you flip your clothes the way you would flip real estate,” she said. “You buy pieces, wear them and enjoy them, and then you sell them on eBay. If you pick up a piece of clothing from your closet and think, ‘Oh my God, I’ll never wear that again,’ you should sell it so someone else can enjoy it.”
EBay has evolved over the years to make this easier, she said. “More than 70 percent of the goods are fixed-price now,” she said. “When it launched, it was an auction house.” About $10 billion in sales at eBay comes from transactions conducted on mobile apps (Miller likes to check for new items from favorite designers while waiting for the eBay bus to whisk her to San Jose for work). Another $10 billion in sales is conducted through PayPal, she said.
When she is not working (“I like to work 1,000 hours a day,” she joked), she visits Brussels with her beau (a native of Belgium), takes shopping trips to Santa Fe, N.M., and New Orleans with girlfriends, and enjoys taking in the arts and culture of San Francisco, including movies at the Castro Theatre.
But the key to her nesting instinct is always thinking about how to incorporate into her home life bits of her journeys abroad.
“Over time, your apartment becomes a living representation of your adventures and travels,” she said. “It’s a living scrapbook.”