Pros
Cool work culture and access to the latest releases. The studio was overflowing with talent, people were generally pretty cool and personable to the point where many of us were friends or would at least hang out to some extent outside of work, and discounts + internal raffles made it easier to cop releases, which is a dream for anyone into sneakers and streetwear.
Cons
Horrible pay, unrealistic prioritization, terrible upper management, abysmal HR, lack of boundaries and professionalism where it matters most, poor working conditions. People often wore multiple hats for worse pay than what just one set of responsibilities should earn you, to the point where the majority of people working there lived at home or had roommates because they simply couldn't afford a place on their own. Everything is "priority" once it's assigned so there's no real sense of how important or urgent things are, making it impossible to effectively manage your time with the high volume of work. A lot of the processes and standards when I came in were just thrown together and poorly defined so I spent a lot of time refining them myself because it drove me crazy. HR and upper management are some of the worst I've experienced or heard of. There's no support, no transparency, little respect for employees to the point where when yearly review time comes around, they're liable to just have a 2 minute conversation with you glossing over the review entirely just to say they did it and move on. The power would go out often, forcing us to reset the breaker because we could only have so much plugged up at once, especially in the summer where we needed mobile a/c units to stay cool since the a/c in the building didn't reach the studio. Because of this they decided to ban us from using the A/C units... There was also really hazardous cable management and really no safety guidelines, which lead to an OSHA investigation. I vividly remember, in response to many of us asking for raises and better working conditions, head of HR pulling the studio team to the side to tell us during the pandemic that they were only employing us to do us a favor because the business really doesn't need us. Don't get me wrong, there were some great moments working here, but the bad far outweighed any good. It seems like this business depends heavily on young people who don't know any better or who would otherwise struggle to find employment elsewhere, especially in fashion beyond retail sales. I was both.