Pros
Nice people in the trenches with you, but that is about it
Cons
This place is what you must see when looking up leadership toxicity. Let's start with a few things here: 1. The CEO is not pleasant. If she doesn't have her way, she will repeatedly text or call you on a whim (even outside working hours) and harass you to solve a non-urgent issue. This can seem normal in any small start-up company, but what makes it bad or unbearable is she has zero respect with messaging. She points fingers, puts blame on others, talks in circles with no aim or resolution mindset. Sits and pouts and complains about an issue for way longer than actually necessary. Very dramatic and insensitive to people and dense. She has made comments against the team in the past when advising that customers are upset over waiting the 20 business days for their refund or longer for a return saying things like "Why would they be upset waiting longer for money? It's not that big of a deal. They can wait". Has told great and hard working employees who have submitted resignations in the past that they were "f'ing over the company" (yes full expletives). Has to be somewhat classist with the refund commentary but also making comments toward our BPO employees in the Philippines like "WELL MAYBE THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS THERE but not here” or if there is any small issue of a dissatisfied customer made by our BPO employees to say things like "this is why I didn't want to bring on people like them". Forget your mental health or sanity or any of your time off because you will be messaged even during your PTO as anyone in a management position. There is no actual time off. They will corner you to the point of having you anxiously anticipating a phone call if there is any small thing that goes wrong. Oh? Did you want to ignore the CEOs text messages in off hours? No worries. She’ll text you with our HR person in a group thread again until you do. None of the issues are fixed at the root and the CX team is who has to suffer for it, not just through grievances from customers but angry messages from the CEO blaming the team for an upset customer. 2. The product offering? The team works really hard to develop and work with what they can. They work with the cheapest external vendors who do not care about timelines because we want to cut costs everywhere and don't have the money to afford higher quality vendors. The team is always late paying vendors for the jewelry as well which is what can cause late orders because they're tight on cash flow. This is of course direction from the people that own the company. All the communication emails are fake and not the actual reason why orders may be delayed. Things change with pieces all the time that don't even match the website without notice because they want to save money or effort as much as possible. All the pieces are cute in theory but definitely poor quality relative to other jewelry brands. No one actually knows sometimes when things will ship out. We had a customer order from December that did not ship until June. Orders are always late shipping more than 2-3 months after ordered even for things as small as gold ball studs. Your return won't be processed not because we can't or our team is still opening the items. It is because we can only process a certain budget every week and it is not enough to get returns processed within the promise date. Sales are created with no inventory available to fill orders because the company is always under targeted demand. Wrong items will purposefully get sent out sometimes just to satisfy a shipping date, i.e. you may have ordered a size 5 but since we only have a 4.5, we'll try to stretch it with a mandrel as much as possible so maybe it can pass for the size you ordered or ah we'll super glue on your pearls to your pieces because we couldn't get it fixed to ship to you in time. Also most of the times a donation doesn’t actually go toward any company, just toward the founders’ pockets. 3. The pay is absolutely the minimum of the minimum of any company or industry. You would make more money at a McDonalds. Employees make much lower than industry standard in every department and I truly think those that stay there just do because they feel bad for each other since everyone gets along while suffering together. They do not want to pay overtime for hourly employees and you will be warned to keep it at a minimum if you approve it even as a head of a department. 4. Terrible benefits. Health insurance is at minimum like upwards of $200.00 out of each paycheck. The PTO offering is awful relative to other companies and start-ups. There are no other benefits really there that make the company any revolutionary or beneficial place to work. 5. They have this idea that they have 10 Golden Commandments but the ones highest up do for not follow ANY of these whatsoever. Values here are non-existent. It's all talk about "this is our vision and this is why we started the company" but they truly just started the company to make cheap jewelry and pocket the huge mark-up to pay for vacations and trips overseas while their team is slaving away with zero appreciation. If you are interviewing, you will probably be told something like "Whatever you need, just tell us, and we'll make it happen" and that is definitely NOT the case. It's more like "Tell us what you need. Maybe we'll respond next month to the request but expect you of course to answer our emails and requests within right away. Also while we review the request, can you also do x, y, z too?" 6. MOST OF THESE GOOD REVIEWS ARE FAKE. We did not even have a store in 2021 how can there be store employee reviews???