Pros
The furniture and gallery layouts are completely beautiful. It can appear vanilla on the surface, but that's just for accessibility...the possibilities are endless. For more intensive, whole-room and whole-home designs a little edge and personality is encouraged and appreciated by senior designers during selection reviews. Senior designers and those higher up than them specifically in the design organization are generally brilliant, creative, and helpful people who just want to create cool things with the gallery design teams. Additionally, this is a great job for students who are currently pursuing a design degree, or are looking for their first gig out of design school. Mainly in that it sets you up for all of the complexities (good or bad) that come with working for a large corporation and with the general public. If you have a good head on your shoulders, there are a lot of soft skills that can be gained from the work here that can take much longer to develop in a more boutique setting. This is my very nice way of saying “If you can deal with the ridiculous management culture at RH, you can deal with literally anything at any other company ever.” More of that in the cons. Lastly…the pay is exceptional for the actual day-to-day work that’s expected. I’d imagine there’s a differential in there for having to deal with all of the other unnecessary facets of the job I’m about to talk about, but the “pay” to “difficulty of the actual job” ratio is one of the best in retail (yes, it’s retail. If your interviewer told you it wasn’t then you’ve noticed your first of many red flags that come up during the hiring process. More of that later too).
Cons
RH emphasizes assuming positive intent. I don’t write this out of bitterness. I’ve moved on and had great experiences since. But I believe in calling out dysfunction when it damages talented people. The company culture is completely abysmal, usually on the gallery leadership level (unless you get really lucky), and definitely on the field leader and above level. It is infested with managers who think the only way they can make themselves look better, is by making their peers look worse. Quick Story: When one of the big galleries (with a restaurant) opened, someone called for a table that was 30 minutes away, but it was 15 minutes before closing so the caller was told it would be too late to seat them. Well it turns out that caller was in our C-Suite. So how was this issue dealt with? The “Chief People Officer” scheduled an impromptu virtual meeting with all gallery leadership, to publicly humiliate the specific individual (by name) who denied service, on a call with over 100 people and made them publicly apologize and reaffirm their allegiance to senior leadership (Not field leaders. Field leaders are not senior leadership regardless of their title). That is the culture at RH, full stop. If that doesn’t encapsulate the level of delusion and immaturity that exists in pretty much every facet of management in this company than I don’t know what does. Field leaders openly brag about deliberately making applicants wait 30-45 minutes past the scheduled time to begin the interview (including in front of hourly leadership and sales associates), just to see how they’ll react. Imagine the reverse, an employee showing up 30-45 minutes late unannounced to a team call. Anyone who works or has worked here knows the answer to that. Field Leadership is saturated with individuals who have no idea how to react when things don’t exactly go their way, but love to see how others react when things don’t go THEIR way. The above illustrates examples of each of those…these are both specific and factual examples. Culture is what actually shows up in the day-to-day, not what you carry around on a card in your back pocket. This is the management culture at RH. RH operates completely in the image of its CEO. At the core, praising him and agreeing with him is the only thing that matters, and any deviation from that by any employee will result in them wearing a scarlet letter until they find something else. They’ll get “bullied out”, not fired. In fact it’s virtually impossible to get fired from this company outside of the occasional restructure, thanks to inconsistent HR practices…is there even an actual HR department anymore? When the “People Team” was given new assignment, galleries were instructed to forward all HR-related concerns to the Field Leader. And management is so out of touch they think everyone who works here is dumb enough to not see the concern with that. Again…do you REALLY value people who are smart? People smart enough to see through stuff like this were made miserable until they left, regardless of their tangible contributions to an actual company culture. This company has almost no practices that are consistent enough to make an actual HR department function. If that were the case this company would have no one in leadership thanks to the culture of bullying, retaliation, and public criticism of one's looks/fashion choices that don't meet the antiquated 1995 version of "luxury" that upper management still somehow thinks is acceptable. So at least it makes sense that there's no medium to enforce this, even if it shouldn’t. During my time there turnover was not tracked and there was no employee satisfaction survey (this has got to be the largest company in the US that does not have one of these), presumably because higher-level leadership is comprised of people who have never been told “no” in their lives and thus got to where they are by simply saying “yes” enthusiastically so there’s no capacity to deal with anything that might either force them into an original thought or hold themselves accountable for their (lack of) leadership. Holding eternal grudges against line-level employees because of a concern they raised years prior that gallery and field leadership didn't like is hopefully NOT what RH has in mind with "Don't take 'no' for an answer." But unfortunately that's how it shows up. Turnover isn’t a problem, it’s a symptom of a problem. And high-level leadership at RH is the specific problem and does not have the social capacity to receive any type of critical feedback from anyone who isn’t above them on the org chart. And even when they do that they're faking it, just like people below them fake to them to get them to walk away or otherwise stop talking to they can focus on doing actual work that matters. Anyone who leaves RH at any time is immediately labeled as “they weren’t a values fit” or “they weren’t luxury” to the point to where that’s lost all meaning. If turnover were tracked, leaders would have to hold themselves accountable for hiring and training and feedback and the employee experience, because the opposite of “luxury” is having higher turnover, worse employee benefits (do you know how awkward it is in an interview to tell applicants that a company of this magnitude doesn’t have a 401K match? Talk about management genuinely not expecting anyone to be here for any meaningful amount of time), and easily the most out of touch management from any industry I've ever worked in. The values are words on paper, full stop. No points of view are valued whatsoever that don’t explicitly agree with gallery leadership’s POV, field leadership’s POV, and especially the C-suite’s POV. “Driven, determined, and won’t take no for an answer” is explicitly about getting customers to spend money. It has absolutely nothing to do with advocating for one’s self, or ESPECIALLY pressing a competing opinion that differs from that which was publicly handed down by the senior leadership as an instruction for how all of leadership should also feel about something. It's simply about selling drapery. Nobody in management here could care less about how smart one is at this job, and any creative thought or opinion on anything organizationally is either ignored or your ticket to being bullied into finding something else.