• Nepotism and favouritism is the lifeblood of DCK - if you’re an old school friend of a director / a relative / an ex-colleague of someone in higher management, enjoy your leg up into an easy stream of quick promotions / lucrative career where you can enjoy being a big fish in a very small pond.
• The company overall has always been ruled by an underlying culture of fear and intimidation; if you speak up about anything, prepare to be quickly shut down by HR and senior management, strategically ‘managed out’ of the business (through either bullying or redundancy) or at least have those worries hanging over your head the whole time you work there.
• Horrible office environment, structure and mentality - dirty, dusty, cluttered and drab, annoying middle-of-nowhere location, extremely corporate, lack of diversity in head office hiring, long working hours with often unreasonable workloads, stale atmosphere, uninspiring and you forget you’re in a fashion-oriented company.
• Very old-fashioned company structure, an obsession with job titles and incredible amount of micro-management. Prepare to be purposefully excluded from things like meetings (that directly impact your role and workload) and company conferences purely for being a junior member of the company or having the wrong job title.
• Multiple “levels” created in junior roles (in departments that definitely don’t need them) for no other reason than to hold back pay rises, when you’ll be doing the work of at least 2 people yourself anyway. A lot is expected of you in terms of the qualifications, level of talent, experience and range of skills you bring to your role in exchange for laughably low pay. If you ARE promoted in a “lower level” there is huge amount of secrecy involved and you are told by both senior management and HR not to tell anyone in your team which has previously caused animosity, jealousy, friction and confusion from other colleagues, and created a really horrible and uncomfortable working environment.
• Significant elements of your contract are changed on a whim and as an employee you are not given any choice or say in the matter - HR will literally shut you in a room one-to-one and force you to agree to the changes. Some of the HR team also come across as completely disingenuous in the confidential ‘support’ they offer and will snitch your concerns directly and indiscreetly to any others involved anyway.
• Little to no support with necessary work equipment during the pandemic to ensure SAFE, comfortable and effective working from home.
• Staff turnover is very high. Anyone genuine that arrives with talent, optimism or who is particularly great at their job seem to get worn down and leave the company after a short period of time, which in turn creates more low team morale. Lots of people that leave appear to be quite scarred by the experience they had there for a very long time afterwards and seem to band together in their collective trauma.
• You will be made to constantly question, second-guess and doubt your own talent and abilities by the people “above” you and put under a huge amount of pressure and stress. To get through the worst parts and provide some perspective its necessary to remind yourself that you are all just there producing cheap, throwaway product destined for landfill, and not on the front lines saving lives; which would actually warrant the amount of stress induced by the job at times.
• If you are rude, catty, pushy, controlling, ruthless, a game-player, on a power trip and / or out for yourself, you will get far as this type of behaviour seems to be favoured and rewarded over kindness, compassion, fairness and decency.
• “Positive well-being” is heavily promoted by the HR and higher management teams at any given opportunity but not really followed through by many of the actual line managers who will ensure you are worked to the bone and unnecessarily bullied into the office during a pandemic.
• The company doesn’t seem to be regarded very highly externally and only appears to be known by others in the retail industry for its poor treatment of staff.
• Being part of the company genuinely felt like being on board a sinking ship. DCK are clearly struggling financially however much they try to deny and hide the true figures from their employees. Lots of time and money was and is invested into failing areas of the business and strange pet projects that have no clear long-term strategy behind them and seem to benefit no one but the (under-qualified) directors egos.
After leaving, a recruiter reached out to try and hire me for the same role at DCK which was being advertised with a salary of £10K+ more than I was paid, to do the exact same job. Avoid this joke of a company at all costs - you won’t be valued until they are DESPERATE. They are now re-filling roles that they made redundant very recently.
