OK - Factory Planner Danner Employee Review

Great culture, great leadership. Employees are happy to be there and there is a lot of independence in choosing your own projects. The factory is warm and welcoming, people say hi to you. There is fantastic work/life balance. Local leadership is organized and there is a clear sense of direction. It is exciting to be a part of advancing technology.

A lot of uncertainty with who the brand's customers are. Is it for boutique shops? Blue collar workers? Service members? Hippies? It is not clear who the target audience is. It feels hypocritical to work for a brand that is proudly made in the USA, which is valued by a lot of customers, only for the company itself to be owned by a Japanese company.

-Great benefits: 3 work weeks PTO & 3 floating holidays every year not accrued, 401k matching, $5 apparel item & $5 new boots every 6 months, dental, vision, watch ID, $100 wellness reimbursement, etc -Flexible schedule: Can make your own schedule as long as it's within reasonable working hours & you total around 40 hours. 4 10 hour shifts, choosing your day off week to week, or 5 8 hour shifts. -Work in a small team & independently -Working with your hands in a creative way -Very little customer service required (occasional window walk-up customers) -Learn about & how to repair boots & shoes, in addition to leather work. -Learn how to stitch (to a degree) -Work with a great team of interesting people

-Upper management can be stubborn, controlling, & not receptive -Hypocrisy of intensely marketing the Recrafting department, yet not listening to the workers, not helping repair machines, constantly giving old or broken tools & machines, not paying us enough -"Quality first" is the company's tagline, although they clearly prioritize production numbers over everything else. Verbatim I've been told to "lower your quality" by upper management for the sake of higher production. First quality boots that make it into recrafting can often be made poorly (not centered, liner stitched in poorly, midsole stitched bad, etc.) -Production numbers rule everything. Coworkers can accrue a whole stack of complaints from customers about a poor quality recraft & general unhappiness with the finished product, but if that coworker is meeting goal & producing high numbers they are good in the company's eyes. Vice versa, if a coworker is not meeting goal but producing higher quality & getting more compliments, they get reprimanded due to low numbers. If a machine is broken & we don't know how to fix it, maintenance doesn't come, you need it to finish your boot but can't & your numbers are low because of it, upper management doesn't care & you get reprimanded. Anything that is still well within your job requirements but doesn't involve strictly recrafting boots is rarely if ever considered in context to production, even though they say they do. -Quickly transitioning to more AI & automated work. Danner fired 30 production workers at the factory, then bought a huge expensive robot to replace them all. They shortly after bought another robot to add to the automation. -No room for growth. Recrafting is a dead end in terms of upward mobility within that department. You can only go to a Recrafter II which is the same thing just higher expectations. There are no intermediate roles available in between Supervisor & Recrafter, even when that could improve the quality of the department & boost morale for striving to grow. When suggested, upper management was completely unreceptive. -Pay is decent, especially with the benefits, but isn't enough. Considering the risk of physical or internal injury, consistent physical labor, extremely poor shop ventilation, extra labor for tasks outside of producing, large amounts of chemicals, debris, & fumes consistently in the air, you can feel exhausted all the time & feel like your labor & effort should be valued higher. -Overall has a bad morale. Everyone feels overworked & underpaid. Work can consistently be frustrating when there are simple solutions that never seem to happen. Coworkers can have an intense competitiveness & judgment towards other coworkers' work (my way is the best & your way isn't as good as mine). Sometimes is not the most inviting, supportive, or friendly culture. -Terrible communication both horizontally & vertically. Changes in procedures or tasks can happen & not be effectively communicated to the whole team, leaving some to know & others to be in the dark. Upper management rarely genuinely cares about what recrafters' opinions are. Management doesn't clearly communicate what they want or expect. A lot of things said can feel implied or talking around something, which can be very confusing due to the indirectness & patronizing nature of it. Management will fix things for you instead of addressing the issue with you, so you can be aware of your mistake & fix it in the future. Management can be selective about certain tasks people do, altering a set standard but keeping it compartmentalized to that one person.