Refinery29 reviews

The Insta-Founders’ lack of experience is on full display every day as they bungle promotions, company meetings, day to day interactions with the staff, and strategic decisions. The other members of the c-suite on are equally incompetent and know only how to manage up or push blame downwards. The new COO seems smart but she’ll probably leave as everyone who knows what they’re doing does after looking under the hood at R29. It is a culture of fear and pink narcissism. My friends who have left (voluntarily) tell me they feel like they’ve been freed from a psychological prison that you can’t understand when you’re in it because they execs run around going “it’s digital media! It’s digital media!” as an excuse for their inability to behave in a respectable way and make you feel like YOU’RE the problem. If the mission is to support women to claim their power, why is the culture unsupportive, dysfunctional, and predatory? The executive team is so impressed with themselves they don’t even try to change their behaviors. They don’t realize how little respect we all have for them, and even if they did, they’d just write a woe-is-me Instagram post about it to increase their followers.

Where to begin?? This company is like all the bad parts of high school, except now it's your career (and your rent, or lack thereof) on the line. There is zero emphasis placed on quality of work; it's all about how you look, whether you're conventionally attractive, and whether you are an Instagram influencer. The work hours are unbelievable and there's no such thing as a lunch break (Yes, it's illegal not to give employees a lunch break, and R29 would of course say that all employees are "allowed" lunch. But what single employee is going to break for lunch when the 300 people around them are working straight through?) And speaking of illegal, R29 will straight-up promise employees something — a certain pay rate or job, a bonus, or time off — and sign a contract for it, and then "change their mind" whenever they feel like it. But because they hire almost exclusively 22-year-olds, employees have no idea that these abuses are not just par for the course out here in the real world post-college. (Also, 22-year-olds are very unlikely to be able to afford to hire a lawyer and sue.)