BeneFit Cosmetics Reviews

Pros

Full of makeup, femininity, and creativity! Excellent compensation. Full of hugely talented, dedicated, and smart people. Fun loving group! They have a Halloween costume contest!

Cons

Difficult to move up. The really fun/creative projects are left to the higher ups (VPs, etc.). Many of the talented people working there talked to me about being dissatisfied with their work because they want their ideas to be heard.

Advice to Senior Management

Hold a presentation where employees demonstrate their unique ideas (even be outside their department). Have upper management listen to the ideas and work towards implementing the ones that might work for Benefit. Let the employees wow you.

Pros

-LVMH perks (Fresh discount, gratis, and Marc Jacobs)
-LVMH on your resume
-Beautiful Office
-Travel
-LVMH Training courses
-Exposure to a lot of different teams

Cons

-Poor salary
-Poor leadership
-Treat everyone employee as though they are totally replaceable
-Completely Unprofessional in meetings
-Totally abusive work environment

Advice to Senior Management

-Create an open forum for feedback and actually act on that feedback.
-Abusive senior management makes what could be an amazing place to work terrible, work on setting up an environment that doesn't tolerate abusive behavior.

Pros

products are quality and the packaging is fun.

Cons

do not give gratis unless you go to training and they still give you very little.

Pros

Summer Hours
Gratis (aka free make up)
Opportunity for advancement
Discounts from other LVMH subsidiaries
Fun brand with fun people

Cons

-Upper/middle mgmt chew out the workers at meetings
-Terrible compensation (yearly pay increase (for non-management) is the same % as inflation)
-Constantly, there is 1 person doing the job of 2 or 3 people
-Salaried employees work 24/7
-Employee retention is fairly low
-Very obvious favoritism towards French counterparts

Advice to Senior Management

Work on hiring better managers and evaluating the effectiveness of managers better. A lot of problems stem from the lack of leadership among middle management.

Pros

Small perks for employees and their families (namely free makeup)
Having the name of a global company in your resume
Great space at the headquarters, very nicely designed

Cons

Management is overly abusive, impositive and authoritarian unless you're one of the "favorites" (as in, being brought in by management w/o even having a formal interview with HR).

No room for growth, once you're doing something you will be doing that something for a long time and forget about being proactive, the more expertise, motivation and drive you show the more you will fall out of grace—you will basically look overqualified for the position and send red flags all over

Just as in high-school, there are all these mini-groups who are very uptight about opening up to new hires. You will be sitting alone during lunchtime for a long time before someone starts to open up to you.

Lots of people will smile at you but it's all a deception. Expect a lot of back-stabbing from management, from your peers and even from those below you.

Expect lots of disrespectful malicious behavior from your peers. Don't even complain with your manager or HR because you will be considered the troublemaker.

You will see employees who are very actively working on projects, suddenly go MIA and you won't hear about them anymore or see them anymore. If you inquire about those MIA then you are just told that they left because of "personal reasons".

Upon signing your contract prior to start working and upon leaving for "personal reasons", you will be asked to sign an extensive multi-page agreement in which you give up all your rights to even criticize the cupcakes they serve you during people's birthdays. If I remember correctly you are not allowed to criticize previous employees, current employees and (even) future employees. That's how scared they are about people's criticism and that is the reason why current and former employees post anonymous reviews about Benefit, here on Glassdoor and on any other site of a similar nature. Unfortunately this type of ultrabinding agreement allows for a lot of malicious behavior to happen with impunity, because at the end these malicious peers know that out there no one will dare say anything bad about them.

Advice to Senior Management

Dissolve the entire company (headquarters, beauty salons, browbars, etc) and restart anew.

Pros

When allowed, creative teams especially overseas have clever ideas
CEO, CFO, COO are very good leaders and extremely knowledgeable about the industry

Cons

Creative leadership is heavy-handed bordering on abusive
HR is ineffective and never addresses bad management
No career path or training other than longevity, which promotes unqualified people to decision-makers
Almost no one trusts their mgr or believes in her ability to manage a team
behind the curve in use of technology -
too much $$ spent on travel.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce the carbon footprint - concentrate on a metric other than sales to gauge success.

Pros

The hourly wage is good.

Cons

Pushy (8 steps) sales tactics.
Dishonesty from upper management.
Lack of organization.
They are only about getting sales goals and not about helping the customer find what he/she wants.
As a beauty artist you will basically be a receptionist. Answering phones, making appts. for the aesthetician and ringing up their clients. And if someone happens to walk in for makeup (which people rarely do here) you don't even have time for them because some of the aestheticians refuse to ring up their own customers.
It's not a good place for a makeup artist. At the boutique that I worked at there was not a lot of foot traffic. (mostly due to metered parking issues). Most of the customers come in for the brow bar only. They have an appt. and put coins in the meter for 20 minutes and then leave. But the problem is that as a Beauty Artist you are required to push product sales (the 8 steps!) on the customers coming in for a brow bar service. Most of them do not want to buy product or even have it tried on. But you will be required to do the 8 steps even if the customer doesn't want it.

Advice to Senior Management

Each location is different. Sales are not going to be as high in a store that only offers metered parking on a very busy street. Also, I believe that each customer is unique and special in their own way and therefore the 8 steps does not work on everybody. Beauty artists should be free to be genuine and unintimidating in their sales approach. Guaranteed this will result in happier customers for life!

Pros

Discounts
Good Location
Nice Office
Some good coworkers

Cons

Management
Compensation
No Respect
No Work Life Balance
No Organization

Advice to Senior Management

Get organized better. Place is like a zoo.

Pros

Part of a great parent company (LVMH), fun products, lots of creativity, excellent CEO, growing company, international opportunities, good chances to grow within roles, good history of promoting leadership from within.

Cons

Needs to develop mid level management, tolerates some weak leadership.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to recruit top talent into the company in key leadership positions.

Pros

Fun line, great makeup... loved trying new products & learning about them. Most of the products do what they say & customers love them.

Cons

Hated selling things to people they didn't really need. Pay wasn't close to what it should have been when the goals were by far exceeded.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay employees what they deserve, offer rewards for a job well done. Appreciate your employees & say thank you for hard work.