When we first started Gilt Groupe, our invitation-only website that sells luxury fashion at a steep discount, I turned to my co-founder Alexis Maybank, and said, “What do you think the office dress code should be?”

Alexis, a Silicon Valley professional in a pencil skirt, had come from eBay and AOL, where she assured me she had never had to follow an office dress code. I’d come from Louis Vuitton where I wore interlocking LV’s from heel to handbag and while on a stint at Bulgari only wore their (very nice) jewelry and watches.

We decided not to enforce a dress code at our New York HQ and if there was a fashion emergency down the road, we would deal with it then.

As Gilt Groupe has grown to a 200+ person firm we adore the personal style of every employee. And just like high school there are fashion cliques.

The blokes in our warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard are the coolest distribution guys in Kidrobot tees and John Varvatos jackets, of course, all bought on Gilt.

Our creative director Leah Park arrives at work in white Converse sneakers and like Wonder Woman pulls a pair of strappy silver Manolo Blahnik’s out from under her desk and she’s suddenly a show-stopping, iMac-clicking genius and fashion plate.

And our fashion buyers are a perilously on-trend gaggle who not only make the best deals in the business they own their style — in micro minis, swinging tops and layers of Vera Wang jewels.

But it’s the engineers who deserve a special shout out. The first time I met the brains who built our Gilt Groupe website I was wearing a Christian Lacroix three-quarter length jacket, sublimely-tailored Alvin Valley pants and ridiculously high Louis Vuitton platform shoes. To be honest, I think they were slightly aghast.

But now I feel they’re accustomed to their new fashionable milieu. Our engineers arrive at orientation in denims and, horror of horrors, comfortable-looking shoes and within a few Red Bull-fueled months they’re decked in Dolce & Gabbana. They can also spot a crimson Christian Louboutin sole at a hundred paces. I challenge any other IT department to do the same!

It was at the Gilt Halloween party last Fall that I realized that the whole dress code kerfuffle would just crush our nimble worker’s creativity. One of our key executives came as a realistic Karl Lagerfeld, we had two perfect John Gallianos and a buyer as a convincing Coco Channel.

It takes a lot of fashion irregulars to make the business world tick, but gosh, I love working in it. Did I mention while typing this I’m wearing a Gilt-sourced, shoulder-bearing silk chiffon Milly dress with a peppermint and coral paisley print? Of course, I got this frock from work. Talk about business with benefits.

In just one short year, we have seen NYC shift from a city of “keeping up with the Joneses” to one focused on “outsaving the Joneses.” Now what does this mean? We have started to see a sea change in behavior.

Instead of comparing weekend homes, vacation destinations or slapping down the Black Amex, New Yorkers are now making “saving” a game of one-upmanship. Out with conspicuous consumption in with conspicuous savings. We of course have no anthropological proof of this trend, however it is something we are witnessing more often when out to dinner with friends or in conversations with work colleagues.

It is neither gauche to compare deals obtained on a new dress, nor is insider savings through, say, cardholder benefits taboo to mention in polite conversation. Instead, people point to their “Staycations” in place of former far-flung vacations and to practical vehicles purchased instead of to a husband’s new Maserati. To show one’s savviness in savings is to show your intelligence and general shrewdness.

Some might say we experience this so often because of our role in starting an online fashion sales site, Gilt Groupe, focused on extending our members designer fashion at insider prices (up to 70 percent off). And yes, our members do flock to us in the interest of showing us a new dress, a pair of earrings or work suit they purchased at a great price. They proudly display purchases on our site and are quick to mention the price point with a sense of satisfaction.

However we have personally witnessed this new behavior outside of work: amongst friends and family members. We do think that this general shift in behavior signals a new culture of saving in New York and nationally. There is self-assurance and a sense of “winning” when obtaining value that suggests the intelligent and in-the-know consumer… saves! This makes sense given Goldman Sach’s recent prediction that “the national unemployment rate will reach 9 percent by end of 2009, and could continue rising into 2010.” While times are certainly tough nationally, especially here in NYC, Gothamites are trying to promote their savviness in savings — and we think they are intelligent for doing so. To miss this trend as a company or marketer is to be out of touch with the times.

From our vantage point at Gilt Groupe, people are stampeding online for our insider deals. And even though they are saving, and proudly so, they are still spending… And spending a lot! They spend, however, in a way that shows they are not willing pay for the overhead that comes with the prices at retail stores any longer. They spend not wanting to leave a store with three bags in each hand a la Sex and the City. And they spend, as long as in their spending, they are obtaining savings. Counterintuitive, but we think this new era of obtaining value in shopping is with us for at least another three years. We would love to hear your read on the topic. Are you seeing what we are seeing?

It is not every day that one gets to start up a business with a close friend of 14(+) years. Over the past 18 months, our start-up has grown from a small room of six people to a booming office of 200+ and counting. We have put in much of our own blood, sweat and tears into what has truly become an experience of a lifetime for us both. Here’s a glimpse of where this wild ride all began and where we are today…

October 31st, 2007, Halloween night-

The evening before our official November 1st launch… We were a small but determined team of six people wholly dedicated to successfully launching our start up concept of Gilt Groupe. Our amazing engineers each pulled an all-nighter to make final tweaks to the code for our site before we would officially blast invitations across the country.

November 1st, 2007, Gilt Groupe’s membership launch-

Show time. Over the course of the day, we sent out invitations to join Gilt Groupe to every single person we had ever met. Several tens of thousands of emails left our servers to sprinkle inboxes (and unfortunately spam filters) of potential Gilt Groupe customers throughout the United States. We were aiming to create a viral business model, but it depended on getting an initial critical mass of loyal style mavens to become members of our company. We thought that once they joined and hopefully quickly became obsessed with Gilt Groupe, they would in turn spread the word to all of their nearest and dearest.

Fortunately, our friends — fashionable, highly educated and tech savvy — were the perfect demographic for Gilt Groupe, so it took almost no convincing to get them to join our website as members… membership was free… We promised to find our Gilt Groupies the very best brands, for unbeatable prices. Our platform also removed all of the stress of NY sample sale shopping. No lines… No getting strip searched… No crazy women grabbing shoes out of your hands… No sneaking out of work and faking a doctor’s appointment. No being forced to pay with cash and running frantically to ATMs across the garment center… No nastiness… No damaged or shopworn merchandise… why wouldn’t someone join Gilt Groupe?

November 13th, 2007, Gilt Groupe’s first sale-

Zac Posen was our first sale on our site. We were so nervous. Would anyone buy anything? Even more important, would anyone visit the site during our 36 hour timeframe? In the 13 days that we ran our membership launch, we amassed approximately 15,000 registered Gilt Groupe members. Between the two of us, we knew almost all of these people — they were our friends and the friends of our friends. We thought 9am seemed like a good start time for the sale because a lot of our NY friends would just be arriving in the office and could probably do some online browsing before their days got hectic. However, we didn’t think about the West Coast… 6am over there. Painfully early! The morning of the sale, we were positioned to act as customer service. We did not know if our phones would be ringing off of the hook with questions from our members. Or perhaps our members would email us with their specific questions. Does a dress run particularly small? From what season was the merchandise? What if a top didn’t fit, could it be returned? Was the product authentic? We were intimately familiar with the product since together we had hand-selected it in Zac Posen’s showroom.

As the sale went live, our engineers noticed a traffic spike on our site. Lo and behold, sales began to trickle in… Our first purchase was from state of Missouri! We were puzzled. How did someone on Missouri hear about us? Neither of us knew anyone there. It was our first sign that viral marketing works. Our next order came from zip code 90210. It was 6:05am in Beverly Hills! We couldn’t believe that someone in California had woken up so early to shop from our site. The concept was working and after 8 hours, the Zac Posen sale sold out and we were elated.

Today, 18 months later, we have truly experienced hyper growth during a time that has been trying for many businesses and we are so gratified to have been a part of every single step of the process. We changed our start of sale time to 12pm EST, friendlier for the West Coast. We now offer our members over 25 sales per week. We have over 1 million members in the US. We launched our business in Japan in February 2009. Our warehouse space has expanded from one small room to three bustling studios that are in constant use. It’s gratifying to see how far we’ve come and thrilling to think how we will grow. Stay tuned for updates on our adventures, challenges and continued growth.