I should have taken the welcome notebook as the first warning sign. It proudly announced, “it’s time to start dreaming again.” In hindsight, that was technically true, if by dream they meant a stress-induced fever dream where everyone is underfed, overworked, emotionally exhausted and smiling on command for LinkedIn. What it should have said was, “it’s time for your nightmare to begin. Welcome to Club Hell.”
Like many people, I was thoroughly snake-charmed by the branding. The glossy social posts, the polished interview script, the glamorous office, the promise of growth, the illusion of culture. You walk in thinking you have landed somewhere ambitious, exciting and aspirational. A dream role in fashion. A premium business. A place full of empowered women, big ideas and opportunity.
What you actually walk into is a designer hostage situation with gold cutlery.
It does not take long for the scales to slip. The glamour starts shedding by week two, and before long you realise the whole place runs on fear, ego, confusion and a desperate obsession with appearances. It is less a serious business and more a badly managed group project with a luxury aesthetic and a victim complex.
The leadership culture is, without question, one of the worst I have ever seen. Decisions seem to be made using a combination of panic, pride, roulette and whoever shouted last. There is no consistent strategy, no meaningful structure and no real accountability at the top. When something goes right, someone senior takes the credit. When something goes wrong, blame slithers downhill at record speed and wraps itself around the nearest junior, manager or scapegoat of the month.
And there is always a scapegoat of the month.
This is a company where people do not seem to solve problems so much as assign them to somebody else and then hold seventeen meetings about whose fault it is. Public humiliation is normalised. Passive aggressive Teams messages are practically a management tool. People are discussed, dissected and quietly stitched up in meetings they are not invited to, before being dragged back in to explain why they have somehow failed to meet expectations that were never properly communicated in the first place. It is not leadership. It is corporate witchcraft.
The culture is not collaborative. It is survival with better lighting.
You quickly learn that there is no such thing as psychological safety here. Everyone is on edge. Everyone is watching their back. Everyone knows the bus is coming, they just do not know whose turn it is to go under it. There is a constant atmosphere of anxiety, whispers, blame and forced performance. At any given point, somebody is crying, somebody is being undermined, somebody is being managed out, and somebody else is pretending all is well because there is a camera phone nearby.
The office itself is almost funny in how hard it tries to distract you. Shiny surfaces, curated aesthetics, expensive touches, all designed to signal luxury. But no amount of polished décor can disguise the fact that the atmosphere is pure Victorian workhouse with a ring light. For a company so obsessed with image, it is remarkable how little attention is paid to basic human needs. No microwaves. Limited nearby options. Long hours. High pressure. Minimal practical care for the people actually keeping the place afloat. All gold plating, no substance.
And the hours. Dear God, the hours.
If you enjoy unpaid overtime, being pinged at ridiculous hours, and feeling vaguely guilty every time you attempt to have a personal life, you will thrive. If you were hoping to work your contractual hours and then go home in peace, that is adorable. Work life balance is treated like an irritating myth invented by weaker industries. Your phone and Teams messages will become a form of low-level psychological warfare. Even annual leave never feels like leave, because the minute you are away you know the chaos is breeding without supervision.
The company also has a very particular skill for making everything feel urgent while accomplishing very little. Every week brings a new spreadsheet, a new process, a new deck, a new meeting, a new tracker, a new panic and absolutely no increase in clarity. Priorities change constantly. Deadlines move. Instructions are vague. Feedback is either non-existent or delivered in the tone of someone furious you could not read their mind. It is impossible to succeed in an environment where “good” is never defined, direction changes daily, and the people giving the orders could not articulate a clear brief if their lives depended on it.
For creative people especially, it is bleak. The company loves the idea of hiring talented specialists, but seems deeply uncomfortable with actually listening to them. You are brought in for expertise and then treated like an inconvenience for having any. Independent thought is tolerated right up until the point it differs from the mood in the boardroom. Then suddenly you are “not aligned,” “not the right fit,” or whatever other corporate horoscope they are using that week to disguise poor management.
The hypocrisy would be funny if it were not so exhausting. The external messaging talks endlessly about empowerment, collaboration and culture. Internally, it feels like obedience, image management and fear. Staff events seem less about rewarding employees and more about generating content. People are dragged along for optics, then filtered through the lens of who looks suitably on-brand. Inclusion feels performative at best. Empowerment is something the company appears to enjoy marketing far more than practising.
And then there is the revolving door.
The turnover is staggering. People leave constantly, are pushed out, burn out, or emotionally leave long before their notice period begins. Surviving a year feels less like an achievement and more like evidence of prolonged exposure. Good people come in hopeful, hardworking and full of ideas, then slowly become hollow-eyed veterans of a very specific kind of corporate trauma. If the company were as committed to retaining talent as it is to staging photo opportunities, it might actually become the business it thinks it is.
And yet, somehow, the saddest part is that there are genuinely brilliant people working there. Intelligent, talented, resilient people. The kind of people who, in a healthy business, would build something impressive. But this is not a healthy business. It is a company with potential being throttled by ego, poor leadership, chronic disorganisation and a culture so riddled with blame that nobody can breathe long enough to do their job properly.
Working here did not feel glamorous. It felt like being trapped in a very expensive hallucination. A place where staff are exhausted, leadership is allergic to accountability, and the brand is held together by social media, fear and the unpaid labour of increasingly disengaged employees.
If you are considering working here because you love fashion, love fast-paced businesses, or think the office looks beautiful online, let me save you some time. This is not a dream role. It is a nightmare in a good outfit. A snake pit in a jersey midi. A luxury-branded burnout factory.
Hand on heart, the worst place I have ever worked. Even Primark has more ethical standards and probably better lunch options.
