Corporate feminism at its best - Retail Sales Associate Wildfang Employee Review

Y'ALL. Where to begin on this. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, I want to preface first and foremost that the staff of the NYC store were subject to the most incredible shortcomings in management in communication when it came to store safety and procedures. As it stands, Wildfang laid off all their retail sales associates with no pay, terminated their healthcare, and disabled their store emails less than 12 hours after sending out the email. I had to reach out to actually regain access to the layoff email so I could keep it on file. The NYC team had been suffering from extreme understaffing (there was one full time and two part time employees the week the store closed) and yet were still expected to keep the store open and make sales goals that were, obviously, becoming more and more unrealistic as the pandemic escalated. Every single other business in the SOHO neighborhood had already closed and were compensating their workers for two weeks—Wildfang, with an eye exclusively on profits, pushed to keep doors open. At that point, the store had NONE of the sanitization products they claimed it had on their Instagram. The store did not have soap. It did not have toilet paper. It had never had hand sanitizer. Who was performing the deep cleaning they advertised? It certainly wasn't any of the three staff left, who were already very concerned about being pressured to keep the store open in what has since become the U.S. epicenter of the virus. Wildfang posted about closing the stores at the last minute on Instagram, and said nothing about their decision to lay off their staff. Despite hundreds of comments asking for transparency, Wildfang point blank ignored the issue, kept posting about kittens and fluffy cows, and took no responsibility or accountability for the way they handled the store closures. The retail staff are what makes the Wildfang experience—they are an integral part of a brand that would otherwise limit customers to guessing their size and how Wildfang's poorly made clothes would fit their bodies. The company's glowing reviews all refer to the customer service—incredible experiences with the staff that Wildfang decided were not worthy of a final shoutout on their social media, let alone the security of two-weeks pay and maintained health insurance. It's fine to be a small business without the means to support staff during a closure, but the company consistently bragged about having an HQ of less than 25 people. The company has, at most, 15 retail staff, who upper management should know by name. Instead, a rushed and vague mass email was sent out and the company quickly moved on to continue pushing online sales. The way they handled this situation was beyond unprofessional, embarrassing, dismissive, and alienating. The layoffs are "temporary," but they will be reopening the NYC store with no team as a result of their baffling shortcomings. Incredible that they thought ignoring the problem would benefit them in the long run. Beyond the experience during the pandemic, the communication and management styles at the NYC store were consistently abysmal.The store had no store manager from December 2019 until the March store closure with absolutely no transparency from upper management about how the search was going for a store manager and how staff were expected to perform in the interim. When a coworker was promoted, there was no official communication about their promotion, nor any communication about how the store would be expected to run with that new position. As a result, newly promoted staff were facing immense pressure to step into a role that they had not been trained for, and was being asked to essentially perform the tasks of an ASM AND a store manager without any of the resources to do so successfully. Staff in charge of visual merchandising were constantly belittled, talked down to, had responsibilities taken away from them, and was asked to work 10-12 hour days with no guidance to perfect store visuals—only for their work to be completely undone whenever upper management decided to come visit with no communication. Reasonable requests like those for a working printer (so we didn't have to pay out of pocket for printing fees to print and ship store orders), better lighting for a cluttered and dark stock room, consistent water delivery, and updates about inventory shipments were either ignored or fulfilled weeks later. The state of the stock room was always a disaster because we received no notice about shipments, and inventory numbers seemed to ignore completely our actual sales, so we were inundated with stock that we literally did not have room for. When staff to have more specific store roles assigned to make the day-to-day more efficient, they were told that because they were a small business, traditional roles (like supervisor, keyholder, backstock and inventory manager, etc), "weren't our style." As a result, there was no accountability, no organization, no communication, and store morale was incredibly low. Cleaning procedures that should have been weekly or twice a week were not done because staff didn't have the resources or the morale to do so. Even the most basic promised benefits, like a wardrobe menu to make sure staff represented the brand well while in the store, was inconsistent, badly communicated, and sent out weeks late. Wildfang makes profits off of corporate branded feminism, claiming to support all the badass babes hindered by the patriarchy, but can't even support its predominantly female and queer staff. In addition, the sizing diversity carried in the store is beyond poor, alienating a significant percentage of hopeful customers. When receiving shipment of a popular product, we would get around 10-15 sizes XS-S, and THREE of our biggest size, XXL. Customers have called Wildfang out for co-opting body positivity movements without the product to show for it, and I can confirm that their goal is not to cater to the size XL or XXL queer customer—it's to cater to slim, conventionally attractive cis women who fit a "future female CEO" label. When a massive demographic of your consumer base are queer and nonbinary people, it's beyond questionable to keep all your vocabulary and marketing focused around exclusively feminine language. I so often felt like I was taking the hard-earned money of queer people who weren't even represented by the behind-the-scenes marketing strategies and concerns of the brand to turn a profit. Training pushed for a "customer first" approach that encouraged us to make conversation and make our customers feel at home, but the only goal was to soften them into making bigger and bigger purchases. The company was so strongly sales-goal oriented that feelings of guilt and shame for not making a goal were common, and incited competition and hostility between the stores. Even in the last week of February, when it was clear that the pandemic was going to impact our day-to-day, we still received emails asking for us to step up our game to make goals—from the same person who, when I was diagnosed with a serious illness and contacted them a week in advance to let them know, ignored my emails, leaving me without any way to use my PTO as a relatively new employee and no way to know if I was going to see consequences for calling out. Selective communication was Wildfang's most significant downfall, as is their careful avoidance of anything that threatens their brand as "woke feminist babes." I was very excited to support and work for this company, and cannot express how beyond disappointed I am not only in how I was treated by the women in power, but how the company as a whole takes advantage of their customers to maintain a brand that co-opts political and social justice movements for the aesthetic. Feminism under capitalism is not feminism—it's just a way for a company to make a quick buck. Clearly, those quick bucks weren't enough. This company does not care about you. This company cares about their sales goals, and they care about being a "women-founded small biz" as a way to shield themselves from any and all accountability. Imagine how easy it would have been to give their staff and customers transparency in this current situation—imagine how much more likely we all would have been to stay. Sadly, their home page right now features company photos to appeal to their customers to keep supporting them—and not a single photo shows any retail staff, who kept the doors open in the middle of a pandemic to keep fighting for a brand they wanted to believe in.