Pros
Retail’s reputation/connection, knowledge and wit on working with different/difficult rich clients, and persistence in bearing through unfair workplace environment.
Cons
Some people could be easily scarred from working at this sweatshop. The pay is low. The basic respect for lower-level employees is nonexistent. The work is copy-paste style with no innovation involved because a huge part of it is how to increase the gallery’s sale digits. The management is fake and useless when trying to manage a toxic office environment. Looking back, I wasn’t sure why I stuck around for a good half of a year (where a day felt like a week) because I was so burnt out and overworked to a point where I wasn’t seeing myself as a regular human anymore. I will give you an example of the RH Marin gallery’s culture: a couple of senior designers go out for their daily 20-minute gossip coffee sessions and it is a known fact. As someone who never does so and is always fixed on their seat for work maximization, I decided to socialize with an endearing colleague one day by going to the gallery restaurant upstairs for a coffee&cookie. We were gone for 15 minutes and I came back that’s when my day ended. One of my senior colleagues was furious only because she did not know how to open an Adobe PDF and needed me on that. Out of nowhere, she harshly berated me in the break room in front of several people for being “unprofessional”, although it was still in the early morning, before we usually begin intense or time sensitive collaborations. After I apologized and promised this won’t happen again, she brought this issue to the store manager, who came to talk to me privately about it. After my second round of kindergartener-level lecture, the store manager brought one more manager the next day only to go though the same exact thing with me again, as if I was not intellectually competent to understand anything in the first place. This kind of scenarios is not person-based at the Marin gallery but rather foolishly repetitive; it is only a representation of the entire all-time toxic, synthetic office culture throughout all locations in this country. I simply couldn’t believe how much time and manpower were wasted on things like gossip, control-taking, judgements, and the act of stepping down on others only to make themselves feel better. This particular designer was not even the worst person I had to deal with in at this gallery in terms of so many aspects. Poor, indeed. With my dignity at negative level, I was not receiving livable wages (I lived in San Francisco making $23/hour here), nor was I learning anything design-wise, which was mostly what I paid my 4 years of tuition at a design university for. To be blatant, I was worked as a machine and treated as a foreign toddler 24/7. Thinking back to my first interview, I was essentially sold by the interviewers’ art of bullshxt because of how good of salesmen they were with their “big vision”; most of them are not designers (did not even go through relavant education). It all came down to pointless and pretentious blankness as they know nothing about how to love and care the PEOPLE they work, who are ironically one of RH’s biggest values that they recite every morning. I eventually came to a realization that nothing was going to ever get better or intentional for me (in terms of career ambition and wellness) so I left as soon as I could, just like all of my favorite and most talented former colleagues at this gallery. This is a glamorous retail store with a completely different story on the inside.