Summer Infant Reviews

Summer Infant is one of the most toxic work environments I have experienced. Employees are under valued. All decision making in the hands of one person who has no exposure to what goes on day-to-day. No formal processes followed, constant wheel spinning and undermining of the company's talent. Employees are expected to take on multiple peoples' jobs with no pay increase. No opportunity for growth. Severe lack of communication across teams which inhibits any collaboration. Under constant surveillance on what time you come in in the morning and how long of a lunch break you take. Not given the resources to do your job.

Summer is structured by business unit and the designers are aligned to specific business units. They lost their head of design about 4 years and have struggled to find a new person to stay in that role. The reporting structure doesn't enable designers to be heard and prevents them from doing good work. Each business unit has a marketing person and a business unit leader, unfortunately across all teams these individuals have very little design experience yet they lead the product design for their groups. This is extremely frustrating and causes you to design a lot of products that already exist. Business unit leaders govern product design based on price and competition more than user needs and wants. Summer lacks any sort of design research they only bring users in at the end of the process to validate things already in production or to seed reviews. Although I think this is a great place for marketing and business roles, designers have little power in this organization. Some business Unit leaders act as dictators rather than partners and the result is poorly designed products which only sell due to cost and product placement.