Lower reviews

It's important to work with good people but at the end of the day, that wasn't enough to keep me. I left Lower about four months ago now. I didn't write a detailed review right away because I needed the last four months to debrief from the experience and heal from the stress. I was hired right out of school and at the time it seemed like the perfect place to start my design career. I quickly learned that wasn't true. I was told that I was sought out for my skills in branding and brand strategy and that I would be working on building out a brand guideline as well as helping to add structure and strategy to both internal and external brand marketing assets. While at Lower I designed employee merch, ordered merch, designed & ordered fixtures for an in-office merch shop, folded hundreds of shirts, and assisted in designing a few marketing materials. I essentially became the merch & vendor relations person. I wasn't doing what I was hired to do. Yes, I was fresh out of college and I'm down to be a team player, you don't get to only work on the things you want to do all of the time. The problem was I wasn't working on anything that I was told I would be. My primary job became merch designer and retail strategist. Along with this I never received a formal job description which I now realize is because the team has no structure, they just need hands. On top of this, the work/life balance was pretty awful. The team's hours are 9-5:30 but there were many evenings and weekends where I was not only asked but expected to be working from home. I'm all for getting things done and I fully understand that every once in a while there's a big deadline and the team might need to work over a little to hit it. At Lower though, everything is always a big deal meaning this isn't a once-in-a-while thing. It was a consistent expectation that was fully self-imposed by management.