Pros
IPros. SO MANY OF THEM. Number one is the friends that I made working here. Let’s start with leadership. I trusted completely each one of my direct leads to help me in my professional journey. They always had my back and pushed me harder than I would ever make myself go. They fought for opportunities for me to pursue outside ventures and celebrated my wins like their own. Number two was the human interaction for me. I sat two seats from the head of our department and we rarely talked about work. I built relationships with our CEO just by talking to him when he came into the break room. For all of the stuff we had to shovel every day, you can still walk into the door and know that these people give a damn about you personally. I think the pressure they put on us to perform was something that hurt them as much as it did us. That wasn’t the way they wanted to run things but it was a necessity to keep us all employed. That’s another thing. During COVID this company put food on my table. They never laid people off (from my knowledge) or shut down. They fought to keep us open and to keep providing for us. I’ll be grateful for that for a long time. Honestly, it only takes this company about 6 months to change in incredibly drastic ways, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they are now thriving and have figured a lot of the cons out. I just have no way to know. The work of this company may let you down, but the people here never will. Number three is the heart of the company. What first drew me to them (other than the fact that I really needed a job) was that they cared deeply about being involved in their communities. Local, grassroots change that got the whole company involved. With Spreetail, this has taken many forms. Once it was a small team running it with a lot of heart and a lot of hours on a local level. Then it transitioned into a more global effort with a full-time team (and an equal amount of heart <3) which had less company involvement than before. After the website closed it went back to a couple people running it. I have all of the confidence and love in the world for the folks currently involved in this venture and I think it’s still the best aspect of the company.
Cons
I’m writing this review *about* 6 months since I left the company. I didn’t know what to title the review as this company really can be a mix of everything you want and some of what you don’t. I think that waiting a while after leaving has given me a little time to give an honest, level-headed review of a company that I spent 2.5 years of my life at, and I think they deserve the feedback. In a lot of ways, my time at Spreetail was a tale of two lives. When I came in, we were an extremely tight-knit group of people who legitimately cared about the people you sit next to with almost endless opportunity if you worked hard enough. If you get your work done in your own department (which is a heavy load) you were allowed the freedom and often encouraged to build relationships and expertise in different departments. I worked with some people who will honestly probably run the company in the next 5 years. We were gritty, we were smart, we were incredibly loving to our team. We supported each other and challenged each other every day. Everything was gravy, baby. We were all working toward a shared goal of building one of the best e-commerce sites in the world, and not just that, but building one with the purpose of changing the world. Then we launched it. The launch was one of the best days of my professional life. Everyone was happy. We flipped a switch and everything we had been working on (some of the folks for over 10 years) became true. We had our piece of the pie. Then we figured out that to make that one pumpkin pie, we bought like 100 lbs of sugar (and also some black olives for some reason). Understandably, things hit the fan. We shuttered that side of the business and went back to doing what we did best, transactional business without brand recognition on marketplace websites. It was and still is the best decision we could have made, it just felt like a punch in the stomach. All of a sudden we started intensifying performance. Everything started getting tracked. Call time went from having a human interaction with someone to trying to save every penny and get them off the phone ASAP. I also saw another person remark that they had to request coverage to go to the bathroom. That did happen unfortunately. Where once we trusted people to make the right choices, we were now starting to double-check and second guess. The team-building aspect of the company dulled. People who were integral parts of our team got frustrated and left for other opportunities. Those of us who were left tried to keep the family dynamic but were soon drowned out by new folks brought in to make us more efficient. Not their fault just different businesses. Towards the end of my tenure, COVID happened and e-commerce BOOMED. It was good for business but terrible for the folks working it. Where once you had time to finish your work and then branch out, you now had to answer emails from customers (expected at least 60 emails sent in an hour) for 9 hours a day. We were often required extra hours over our 45 hours a week (60+ hours a week was probably the norm) just to get caught up. We were not able to hire fast enough for the onslaught (something I assume they have done by now) and people got burnt tf out. It was the norm to have at least one or two people call in sick per day. We stopped trying to improve and started to just try to hang on. Opportunities to advance had dried up. Social functions were pretty non-existent or a far cry from the celebrations we once had.