Gayla spent 10 years at Saks Fifth Avenue as Director of The Fifth Avenue Club, their exclusive personal shopping service. With a desire to learn more about style and expand her horizons, Gayla left Saks to begin her business, Cou-Tours, which offered private, personalized shopping excursions to Paris.

At this time she also developed a pseudonym, Dr. Styles, who on the local morning shows, along with her assistant Nurse Accessory, would drive her fashion ambulance to Houston businesses and ambush women to make them over.

Less than four years later, the do-it-yourself social network site with a $500 million valuation has reached another major milestone — 1,000,000 Ning networks.

On their way to 1,000,000 social networks, Ning’s come along way from their early days, when they experimented with three distinct sites that let you build your own YouTube, Flickr, or MySpace. We’ve since seen these services rolled into the core product that now allows for video, photos, and groups to harmoniously coexist in one place.

Being at the forefront of the social web, Ning has also seen a myriad of direct competitors who’ve done little to throw the social network hub off its way to the top of the social food chain. Sites like Me.com (which no longer exists; the domain is now home to Mobile Me), Big Tent, and BricaBox (shutdown in summer of 2008) did their best to copy Ning’s style, but pretty much failed at replicating Ning’s success and popularity.

Now at 1,000,000 networks strong, you’re bound to find an active social group on any topic, cause, or event that strikes your fancy. Some examples include the very popular Twitter Moms group with upwards of 13,000 members, the This is 50 fully branded social hub for 50 Cent’s 400,000 adoring fans, and Ning’s MuggleSpace, where 15,000 plus Harry Potter fans gather together.