Negative experience in corporate - Anonymous employee Reformation Employee Review

- disorganized hierarchy and chain of command—erratic and always changing, making final direction unclear and opening the work environment to a lot of tension, mistakes, and things falling through the cracks - inexperienced management and leadership which often trickled down to scapegoating those in lower positions or those newer to the team and without existing relationships with upper management and leadership - clique-y, mean girl culture where people are only nice to you if you’re chill with leadership or popular in your department; if you’re not a perfect personality match, you will not be included in water cooler convo. While this is common at plenty of companies, my experience at Ref is that existing employees try to make it seem inclusive but it ultimately isn’t in practice - leadership makes themselves unreachable unless you’re also in leadership or a manager—they notoriously play favorites, are hard to reach when their sign off is needed, and will only communicate with very specific people, creating this really awful wall between leadership and everyone else - departments are in their own silo making it difficult to connect and bond with coworkers in other departments, lack of a sense of community as a result - creative direction is based on pure vibes and bottom lines, very much lacking in conceptual and creative depth and the quality of everything from the marketing to the actual products themselves is degraded by the limitations of the bottom lines I do not recommend working here if you don’t do well with social and corporate climbing or have aspirations in it. Work/life balance is not always respected and managers can act entitled to your time outside of working hours here. Some are comfortable in or maybe even seek an environment like this one, but it wasn’t for me. And it ultimately made me clash with the culture. So I can’t recommend it at all if you’re like me. Even if you like fashion and being close to it all, working at this company can be a highly stressful, imbalanced, and upsetting environment that isn’t worth the tradeoff.