Because the product is amazing, the belief across top management is that it is an easy product to sell. And this is not the case. This misbelief translates into sales teams often not being valued by the work they do, which limits promotions, career development and salary compensation.
Every single year, targets are increased, which is normal in a sales environment. However the company always has notoriously poor practices in communicating this to their employees, who often find out without having it addressed in person and it’s not only their targets that have been increased, but the conditions on how they earn money, making it significantly more difficult to have similar earnings as the previous year.
What is more shocking, is that WGSN uses the fact that is a renowned product in the industry to attract ambitious young employees, offering a salary that is way beyond industry standards. And for some departments the balance between the required labour and the amount of work vs the pay, simply translates into something that can only be compared with slavery. WGSN catches their employees on the fact that many of them have always dreamt of working for this company, and later on when they ask for deserved promotions and pay increases they often face a manipulation tactic, where the employee is lucky to be able to work for the brand and were the employee needs to continue to prove themselves (regardless of all the good work they have already shown) before even being considered for a promotion/payrise. This is to say, that if given employee is to resign, they will be offered a higher salary to keep this person in the role, even when they had been told it’s not accounted within this years budget only a month before.
When I worked at WGSN I frequently worried about the mental and physical wellbeing of my colleagues. Because salaries are low, sales teams need to ensure they are able to perform under unrealistic targets that are not aligned with market conditions. More often than not I worried about many of my colleagues being on the verge of having a breakdown and some ended up having to sign themselves off work for severe distress.
