Photographer and Studio Manager - Anonymous employee LA GARCONNE Employee Review

Everything else. There's a climate of terror among the employees, created by the owner (Kris Kim) that prevents the employees to speak up for themselves, in fear of being fired from one day to the other (which is a very real possibility - read below). Here's my personal experience in it (I've worked there for about 4 months). During the hiring process, the owner mentioned to me that the company was looking to hire a full time employee to fill the Studio Manager and Product photographer position. Since I preferred to work as a freelancer, the owners and I mutually agreed I could be working as a freelancer and I ensured them that I’d work least 4 days per week and 5 whenever the company’s workload/deadlines required it. Not only I’ve always worked 5 days per week - therefore having to financially rely entirely on this job, unable to undertake any other freelance opportunity - but since the other photographer in the company left (after a couple of months I was there), I undertook his tasks in addition to mine and I made sure that the all the company’s needs under my responsibility were met. Therefore, I asked for a raise of my hourly rate. A reasonable one, in the light of the increased workload and responsibilities and in line with the industry’s average rate for this type of position and level of experience (I had worked for the previous 3 years as a full-time studio manager for a fashion photographer). My request, however, never received an answer (funnily enough the owner always stresses out the importance of direct communication among everyone). Instead, over a week after receiving my request and ignoring it entirely, the owners sent a third person to let me know that my tasks, responsibilities and working hours would be drastically reduced (from over 40 hours to 10/15 hours per week) starting the day after (without any reasonable prior notice). In addition to this very unprofessional treatment (both towards me and towards the third person asked to ease out my firing process), there were several other incredibly unprofessional behaviors from the management. A full time retoucher was fired shortly after I started working at the company and since then I had been in charge of interviewing and hiring other freelance retouchers (and firing them as well! All this, still while being paid as at an entry level rate but having to deal with managerial responsibilities). Given the very low rate offered to the candidates (with no room for negotiation), I couldn't find any retoucher who would take the position, despite my several attempts to highlight the issue with the owners hoping they'd consider offering a higher rate. This, also considering the difficult situation the company was facing due to the lack of retouchers and the urgency of finding new ones. While exchanging emails after I was told my hours would be reduced and after I decided to quit (having figured out that this reduction was a mere transitional situation, surely leading to my firing) I was fully blamed by the owners for the lack of retouchers in the company (!). Furthermore, the turn over in the company is unbelievable and based on completely random motivations. In the 4 months I've worked there, I saw 5 people either leaving or being fired on the spot and I was informed that in the previous year 17 people were fired or left the company (which is interesting, considering the company has a total of about 20 employees).