Out of touch company - corporate vs retail
Pros
Good products. Salary was OK.
Cons
I hate to be negative (karma and all) but.... The corporate seemed to be WAY OUT OF TOUCH with the stores. Would never send enough product (sometimes not at all) for campaigns. Always too many corrections (based on previous retail) and discount codes never worked for campaigns. Payroll gets dropped every work period so you have to make constant adjustments. Always looking to save money so what do they do? Spend astronomical amounts of money on events but none on the employees. Review system is set so no one can ever get outstanding. We were even told that no one should ever get high marks (even if they deserved them.) Bonus structure is fairly unobtainable unless you work in a high traffic area. Smaller stores will never get it. Also, one word "Divine" and I don't mean that in a complimentary way. Too much emphasis was placed on selling this product when there were other products that were totally ignored (Angelica). Every time a customer came in we had to demo the Divine line - even if it wasn't suitable for the client. For example: Sales "Bonjour welcome to L'Occitane. So what brings you in today?" Client "A bar of soap" Sales "Great! But let me show you this $107.00 bottle of face cream (slight ad-lib here)" Client "All I want is soap" Sales "No but you MUST try the divine - its fabulous!!" Client "No. I just want soap" Sales "This demo will only take just a second!" Client "No." I hated harassing the clients like this. And again, other skin care was totally ignored even though it was a better match and by the time you are throwing divine down their throat - they didn't want to even look at anything else. Also, too many "one time products". And the next time a client came in we would have to tell them, sorry - that was an LTD.