I started at The RealReal grateful, hopeful, willing, and eager and left embittered, exhausted, and furious.
Pros
Biggest pro is the employees; shared traumatic experience has proven to be a solid foundation for friendships that have endured long after my tenure at The RealReal. For someone with limited fashion industry experience, working here is an opportunity to build your brand knowledge and fashion vocabulary.
Cons
Questionable hiring and promotion practices: this is a workplace where employees have been verbally offered promotions only to find that the position had been filled by an outside candidate days later, promotions have been offered to employees with very limited relevant experience who have personal ties to Executives, employees have relocated cross-country to fill open positions that were not in fact available at the time of their arrival, employees have been "promoted" to department managers, taking on the full workload of a department manager for months with no pay increase or change in job title. Employees with very disparate levels of experience are placed in identical roles. Highly coveted roles are not posted or advertised in-house and are filled by outside candidates with personal connections to Senior level managers. Exploitative work environment: employees are regularly discouraged from taking lunch breaks and rest breaks, pressured to work overtime and 6-7 day weeks, required to work on national holidays last-minute, and discouraged from submitting vacation requests despite accruing PTO as a company benefit. Despite their compliance to these extreme standards, employees are chastised for being 5 minutes late or for engaging in even brief personal conversation while working. Quotas are constantly being raised, but new staff are not being hired and trained at a proportional rate to accommodate the demand for more productivity. The result is over-worked employees and low morale, not to mention a high turnover rate. This company realized it was using faulty payroll systems and had been miscalculating our overtime pay (read: mistakenly over-paying employees). With no announcement and no explanation given, we received paychecks under the new payroll system that were hundreds of dollars less than what we had been accustomed to receiving for the entire length of our employment up to that point. Employees were not given any notice that our pay would be decreasing, or the chance to adjust and plan to be receiving smaller paychecks.
