Originally I was not going to write a review. I could not fathom giving any more of my time or energy to this company but in my 18 years of work experience, this is the absolute most toxic environment I have ever endured and I felt it was my responsibility to give honest feedback to anyone who may ever consider joining this team. So here goes.. What do you get when you take two unhinged and delusional co-founders and then put a couple of know-it-all, egomaniacs barely out of college in c-suite positions? A company with no direction, no mission and no quality who plays the blame game on their teams without looking to where it stems from. If you look up toxic workplace red flags, Fresh Clean Threads checks every box and beyond. I’m not talking run of the mill startup growing pains, I’m talking harassment, bullying, racism, blatant favoritism, retaliation, defamation and more. Calling the team “family”? Insert eye roll emoji #freshfam. Except, I don’t know what family means to the #freshfam because my family treats each other with respect and care. For Fresh Clean Threads, calling employees “family” is just a way for them to manipulate you into feeling obligated to “do whatever it takes” (one of their core objectives). Well, it will take your sanity, your integrity and your personal life and will leave you missing out on life events for your actual family because their “unlimited PTO” is a scam. The entire office looking overworked and stressed everyday? ALWAYS. We’re talking about people hospitalized, crying in meetings, tantrums and the constant response that management “doesn’t have time” for you. They will try to mask this with team happy hours where half of the team will show up as it’s ending because they were too busy at work and then they just talk about how stressed they are at work the whole time. When you actually get to take some personal time off, you will come back to an angry manager with a laundry list of things you somehow did wrong while you were on vacation. Poor communication? This includes but is not limited to: lack of clarity regarding projects, slack messages before and after work hours (when I say I have received a slack message at 3am, I am not joking), passive aggressive communication, everyone on different pages, and getting called out in group settings without legitimate follow-up or feedback. Management will actually sit and text on their phones during meetings and presentations. They occasionally offer “anonymous” surveys but everyone is too scared to speak what is actually on their mind because they don’t believe they’re actually anonymous. When you do provide honest feedback, they take it personally rather than taking action. Cliques and gossipy behavior? See: upper management. They moved in to this ridiculous “look-at-me” office in the La Jolla cove and immediately ranked employees by importance by giving them glass offices with doors while not providing other employees space to take meetings and not providing a space to store the products they create so the office is always a disaster. All so these glass office people can look and feel important. Also, The gossip here is next level. One of the founders once called a former teammate “selfish” because they left Fresh Clean Threads and were very successful in their new endeavor. (please pause to LOL @ this because it CANNOT be made up) Which brings me to my next point…Bad leadership? The issues at this place start at the very top with their founders. They have superiority complexes fit for CEOs of fortune 500 companies yet run a failing, low-quality t-shirt company. One of the founders cannot even be called a leader as she is just a try-hard mean girl who stomps around the office in her 2012 Louboutin booties and bullies people to make herself feel better for not actually knowing anything about how to run a company. The other founder throws literal temper tantrums in meetings that can be heard office wide whenever something doesn’t go his way. This toxic behavior then breeds more and more toxic management through the entire company. The management teams would rather talk ABOUT employees than talk TO them. No room for growth within the company? They would rather fire you and hire someone else than develop within the company. They don’t give job descriptions yet will blame one person when something goes wrong and give no credit when things are working well. Rapid turnaround? Everyone who left this place has either been fired without cause or left out of sheer unhappiness, never because they have found the next best opportunity - despite what management may tell the team. Beyond the workplace culture, Fresh Clean Threads is just generally not a company to be proud to work for. They started by white labeling wholesale tees and selling them at a 1000% markup. When they finally got figured out by the internet, they had just gotten some funding so they were able to outsource their tees but they’re just a direct knock off of the wholesale tees (this is not new news. Google: Next Level/Fresh Clean Tees). Their attempts at doing anything beyond the tees are so antiquated because they don’t actually care about one particular cause and exactly one person in the entire company has actually worked in apparel or retail. Size inclusivity? Yea but only in some styles because “plus size people won’t look good in some colors”. Sustainability? We’ve all heard of greenwashing but this is just a green halo in the form of a few tees made out of “sustainable materials”. They clearly just learned some buzzwords and wanted to use them to make money instead of an actual difference. And don’t even get me started on their CRINGY, misogynistic and body shaming marketing that people would bring up every time I would tell them where I worked. All in all just a straight embarrassing place to work.
