Pros
KONG looks excellent on your resume. The core product is iconic and nearly sells itself. Other products are for the most part super high quality, unique, and innovative. It's a well-respected industry leader with lots of great connections: Chewy, PetSmart, etc. as well as longtime smaller bricks-and-mortar customers who are super knowledgeable about the industry. All mid and lower level employees I worked with were excellent and honestly much of management/leadership was as well. Dogs in the office were super fun, but also somewhat of a con. They really pivoted their manufacturing/shipping/warehouse logistics well throughout COVID and beyond. Quarterly profit share bonuses were nice, and so were the other "discretionary" bonuses for the most part. Overall I learned so much during my time at KONG and I'm thankful for my time spent there.
Cons
The office itself is beyond dated and honestly kind of gross. It's mostly carpeted with tons of stains (dog-friendly office). It's also a hodgepodge of ancient office furniture cobbled together; old chairs that don't adjust anymore and desks that are crumb-riddled and falling apart. Which brings me to my next point... being in the office. As far as I know, their policy is still that everyone must be in the office all of the time. It's 2022... this is such dated thinking at this point. People like the flexibility and comfort of being able to have the *option* to work from home (not even saying they should shift to full time WFH, just give people the option). I personally was an hourly employee at KONG and it was sort of a big hassle to take time to go to an appointment or be home for a delivery or something. I was required to dip into my accrued PTO--I was up to earning about 3 weeks per year by the time I left, but for the first year you can only accrue 1 week of PTO. What a huge pain to have to use that little amount for run-of-the-mill errands like dentist appointments! It was also sort of infantilizing. I'm an adult with an office job and should be able to run errands without having to request time off from my supervisor. Taking unpaid time off was not an option. Also, we all proved that we can work effectively from home when KONG was mandated by the county to let us during COVID, so the insistence that all employees be there every day is kind of insulting. Their reasoning is that a.) it's not fair to the production staff/people who can't do their jobs from home and b.) that collaboration happens in the office in passing/in the lunchroom or whatever. I have all the respect in the world for production employees but the jobs are so different it's beyond comparing apples to oranges. Also my coworkers and I had better ideas over Zoom than we ever had in the hallways. So I guess my point is, they should consider letting people work from home a few days a week, but if they are going to hold firm on not allowing that, they REALLY need to update the office space to this century make it comfortable to be in. Next con is the lack of upward mobility. I observed two of the company president's sons rapidly move up the ranks during my time at KONG. Both started as "interns" (little to no prior work experience) and then within a matter of weeks to maybe months they were both "promoted" to VPs. To my knowledge, no consideration was given to existing employees or to hiring someone with experience from outside. I honestly don't know if I saw anyone get a promotion in my entire time at KONG. But the blatant nepotism (it's present in departments outside of the two VPs mentioned above as well) is so off-putting and hard to honestly justify. Next and maybe the most egregious is the low pay. A job KONG has posted right now is offering $65,000/year to be on site every single day, with a Bachelor's degree and management experience. All I can say is good luck with that. Also, I am paid on salary now, but my equivalent hourly wage went up more than $13/hour when I left. (There is no opportunity for overtime for office employees.) The cost of living in the Denver area is astronomical and if KONG wants to attract good talent they need to vastly increase their pay. I personally know of 8 of my former coworkers who left in the past 12-18 months got very sizable pay increases when they left. I will say the health insurance was good; 401k match is on the lower end of average. Final con I'll touch on is lack of direction. I can't speak for other departments, but there was a huge lack of direction and real leadership in my department. It was like our leadership had these incredible ideas and wonderful vision for the team but couldn't actually put any of that into words or into action. All of my projects outside of my day-to-day housekeeping tasks were very abstract with no defined start, finish, goal, nothing. And the projects I was given that had those things were super menial, intern-type tasks like sorting out old storage. I did not go to college to be sorting out old storage, I'm sorry. But the lack of direction and leadership was flipped back onto the employees as we were "encouraged" to figure out our own projects--though any proposed projects never got off the ground. My team and I were left feeling like we were just bobbing in water alone with no guidance and then shoved back under water when we created our own life raft, which ultimately frustrated all of us to the point that we left.