Stitch Fix reviews

I worked here a long time. When I started, there were ~1000 stylists and they were still two years away from going public. I left at a point where there were closer to 4800 stylists. Since going public, I've been more and more disappointed with the company and the job itself is incredibly repetitive and leaves little room to grow or develop even for those who excel at it. So it's not just people hating the work itself, or having a bad manager. There are real fundamental business choices/changes happening here that have made things Not Great, and I urge you to read these reviews to get the best picture. The level of micromanagement and lack of flexibility has grown while expectations go higher + higher - but stylists cannot get more than a $1 raise after one year of good performance, unless the above-mentioned zip code based pay favors where you're living. I have joined in on the all-hands call each year over nearly five years, and the question always comes up about if stylists will ever get raises or bonuses or benefits, and the answer has never changed or even shifted towards a maybe. Please don't join thinking you can work your way up to those options, it is truly not in the woodwork. Like I said, the pay is great if you're from a state where minimum wage still hovers around $7.50 - but this is a job best fit for someone who already has benefits + another job or a partner bringing in money. If you often get lonely at home alone, you might not like this job either. There aren't many social events, and even when there are, you probably won't be paid to attend or for your parking. However, if you so much as send an email that says "thanks!" off the clock, your manager might get angry at you and ask you to submit a time punch because you're supposed to be clocked in for all the hours you're working. That's totally fair! Except when you're timed on your efficiency and need to only spend about 11 minutes on each client + reading all your feedback, it can be stressful to do all the extra stuff when you're clocked in. You have 30 hours of unpaid vacation a year and that's it - no holidays either. You lose it at the end of the year if it's unused. They have continued to cut down paid sick time accrual over my time here. Meanwhile, managers and full-time employees have unlimited time off and very generous policies and you'll often get a weekly email from your manager about how they're off traveling and spending long holiday breaks with their family, but have a great week! There are still a LOT of kinks to work out with inventory. What you see in their ads is rarely visible to stylists, and when it is, it's often very far out of clients' preferred price range. There are frequent shortages and other issues that mean even the most attentive workers can't adequately fill requests. There is an increasing sense of censorship when it comes to stylists communicating with other stylists - if you post about having a frustrating day because inventory is looking bad, you'll often be met with higher-ups saying that we need to remember to be positive and solution-focused. People just say "I'm really struggling today, and it's been a hard week...any word on when things will look better?" and it's considered aggressive or overly negative. There's not a lot of room to commiserate. There's also a culture of transparency and giving feedback and having "grit" that the company really pushes, but at the end of the day, they twist these words into whatever upper management wants them to be. If you're a tenured stylist giving feedback on a new technology that's really slowing down your process, they'll welcome your feedback - but they won't change it, and they'll remind you that we have to be "open to change". If you ask about why we don't get raises after years of service and above-average sales, they'll bring it up in the next company call to be transparent, but they will never actually give you a raise. After a few years here, I really caught on to this, and what seemed like an awesome, open, women-empowering culture at first only made me sad because I saw that for stylists, it was a completely different treatment.

Lack of process has led to various systemic problems in the org. There is very little accountability for managers, and the org structure is very tall, so half the department is either a director or manager. There is no track for ICs to progress, so there is a lot of organizational pressure for ICs to become managers. Combine the lack of accountability with the organizational pressure, and you end up with a lot of mediocre and inexperienced managers. This can be a very frustrating environment for senior level ICs. All ICs report to the lowest levels of management, since ICs don't have titles. There's no process for skip-levels, there's no performance reviews, formal OKRs, none of that, so there is no objective way to measure anyone's performance. This has lead to a very political and cliquey culture, wherein who you know determines what projects and opportunities you are given, not your actual performance. It's very unclear what things are required to be promoted, and the department seems to prefer hiring from outside rather than growing and mentoring their existing employees. There's no culture of mentorship, so it's a good place to work for a while, but your career will stall out eventually unless you've managed to make friends in high places. With so little process, it's very difficult to coordinate projects that require more than one or two people. This limits the scope of the technology we're able to build, and has also led to multiple teams solving the same problem in different ways. The leadership lacks vision and does not drive projects, so it's basically a free for all with everyone working on their pet projects, and some people do well and some don't.