Sold Out? Gab Waller Can Help

Gab Waller’s hometown of Rockhampton, Australia, boasts stunning architecture and wonderful weather, but it certainly isn’t home to a Prada boutique. “We only had about five fashion stores, [and] everyone was wearing the same thing,” the 29-year-old says of her early shopping options. We’re comfortably seated in a curved booth at Tribeca’s Roxy Bar, and over the next two hours, Waller, who has become known across the globe for finding her clients any fashion piece they desire—regardless of how rare or in demand—recounts her path from driven teen to acclaimed luxury sourcer.

“I’ve definitely always been very ambitious,” she says, her Aussie accent distinctly pronounced. “From the minute I graduated high school, I had this vision that I wanted to be a career girl.” Exactly what career she wanted to pursue, though, took some time to figure out. Given her indecision, Waller forwent college and instead opted for a job in government, where she began rising the ranks in the Australia Department of Fair Trading, first in Rockhampton and later in Brisbane and Canberra. “Someone would write in and say, ‘I bought a TV and it broke after a week. I want to return it, but the store won’t let me.’ I’d look into those kinds of cases.” My response that the job sounds like “customer service on steroids” prompts a laugh from Waller that will echo in our corner many times throughout lunch.

It’s an unbearably hot summer day, and Waller is wearing a blue Loewe tank top embroidered with the brand’s logo, a denim cargo skirt from party girl-favorite label the Attico, and Adidas Sambas designed in collaboration with Sporty & Rich. It’s not the type of outfit you can wear to a government job, and Waller’s love of fashion, she tells me, ultimately led her to start a personal style blog as a creative outlet. “I started my little Blogspot and I became obsessed with Celine—old Celine now—and that was my very first handbag purchase,” she says, noting that she nabbed the Trapeze bag “all the blogging girls were carrying.” The investment, made during a trip to Sydney, opened her eyes to a breadth of luxury fashion she’d never been exposed to. “I treated that bag like it was gold,” she says. “It was my pride and joy.”

With her Trapeze in hand, Waller resigned from her government job and moved to Sydney. “I knew that if I wanted to be in fashion, Sydney really was the place for me to be,” she says. She got a job babysitting to pay her rent, while clocking internships in fashion PR, editorial, and at small boutiques that carried Australian brands like Bec + Bridge, Zimmermann, and Sass & Bide. Waller initially wanted to go into buying, partly for the promise of Fashion Week invites. “I thought that would be such a glamorous, glamorous job at the time,” she says. “[But] I remember seeing those spreadsheets, and I was like, I’m not a spreadsheet girl.” Waller ultimately landed on styling. “That is what felt most natural to me, and I felt that I could really make a career out of it,” she says. While visiting LA in 2017—thinking she’d one day move there to style private clients—she did some window shopping on Rodeo Drive and was shocked at how many luxury goods were in stock in comparison to what was available in Australia. “That was my initial aha moment of ‘I wonder if I can somehow bring these pieces to the Australian market?’”

Back in Sydney, she spent the next six months creating a business plan for what would eventually become @gabwallerdotcom—the white-glove fashion-sourcing service that found Sofia Richie Grainge her Chanel dad sandals and Hailey Bieber her shearling Prada bag. “Those early days were just a lot of planning,” she says. There were some unabashed moves on her part too. Waller wasn’t a VIP client at Dior, or Louis Vuitton, or Chanel, or anywhere, so she began forging those connections by visiting boutiques asking the associates if they’d sell her the brand’s hero pieces—pieces that usually aren’t even on the floor. “It just blows my mind that that’s what I did and how and how I got access without having that VIP status,” she says over her Caesar salad.

Waller initially called herself a personal shopper, but when she officially launched in June 2018, she changed the moniker to fashion sourcer and created her now viral #sourcedbygw hashtag. “I knew that it was going to be a social media business…and the concept was that I would source pieces internationally for Australian clients, or even source pieces domestically in Australia for international clients,” she says. Starting in a smaller fashion market like Australia, and focusing on clients in the wealthy eastern suburbs of Sydney, which she did, came with an advantage. “As soon as you’re in with a few of them your name spreads like wildfire,” she says.