Laurel and Wolf Reviews

Pros

This was hands down the best engineering team I've ever worked on. So many really smart people.

Cons

Seems like the company was poorly run as it is now out of business.

Pros

Flexible, take on as much or as little as you have time for.

Cons

For the amount of work, the payout per project wasn't even minimum wage. Slow platform and always changing. Company came crashing down leaving clients and designers out money.

Pros

- The company is dead - All the people, minus the CEO and the CTO.

Cons

Laurel and Wolf had a slight potential, but this is a classic case of what will happen when you have an inexperienced, illiterate, arrogant, narcissistic, extremely juvenile, pathological liar to be a CEO of a tech startup. Failure. The CEO made it extremely difficult to like the job every time she was in the office. The mood shifted dramatically when she was in the office versus when she wasn’t at work. She IS loud, childish, unprofessional and almost unbearable sometimes to deal with on a day to day basis constantly disrupting work for some others. The CEO forced herself into every department and micromanaged to a degree where she was using her employees as puppets to get her way. And when it all crashed down, she’d blame the employees, fire them FOR WHAT SHE ASKED THEM to do in the first place. Delusional. The CEO has a bad habit or deleting all negative comments online. As opposed to learning from what people are actually trying to say and learn from mistakes. It's called retrospect! No, your problems don’t go away because you keep deleting them from social platforms. It’s a temporary fix, just like what actually went on inside the operations of Laurel and Wolf. No vision, no strategy, no culture and OH no compassion. The CTO is as inexperienced as the CEO. He is a senior level engineer, with limited experience who ended up becoming an executive at the company. Has limited experience of running and managing teams. He was/is moody, rude, highly emotional, snappy and extremely passive aggressive. It made it a nightmare to work with both the CTO and the CEO all day, every single day. He didn't possess any leadership qualities to be an executive, but when you are BFF's with the CEO anything can happen, right?

Advice to Management

Advice to future investors, employers, acquaintances: Make your best judgment and read all the 70 reviews before you consider Leura Fine for future endeavors. She is a good salesperson, truly! She can look straight into your eye and lie. Quite the skill to have. She's had four odd years to change her course of actions but never learned from her mistakes and never will she. Advice to Leura, This one is going to be a really hard recovery for you. But there are many pieces of training programs out there on how to run a company,( and NOT run away from the company) leadership principles and have professional etiquette at work so on a so forth. While you are taking your forced time off, I think those training programs might come in handy! P.S - Are you related to Billy McFarland or Elizabeth Holmes by any chance?

Pros

None anymore, since the company closed down

Cons

This company was built around an wonderful concept and had a solid team of amazing employees and designers. Unfortunately, none of this matters when a company is run by an inexperienced, tyrannical, juvenile CEO. For years, the writing was on the wall; the company was plummeting fast. Rather than allow experienced people to salvage the situation, the CEO chose to lie, make horrible changes to the business model based on her own bad judgement and do nothing but blame others for her mistakes. In a grand finale of despicable behavior, she sent out a false E-mail before Christmas claiming the company was being acquired. However, this is clearly not the case. The business was forced to close. Rather than see the company through till the end, the CEO ran and hid like a true coward, leaving her designers without pay over the holidays, and thousands of clients out thousands of dollars, too. Just when you thought the CEO could not get any worse, she topped herself with the disgusting way she let her own company burn while she ran for the hills. What an embarrassing way for this company to close. When the time comes for the CEO to address the fact that Laurel & Wolf did in fact fail, she will of course lie in a comical attempt to blame others. However, the countless reviews online tell the ugly truth of what really went on here.

Advice to Management

While it's too late to warn people about Laurel & Wolf, to anyone who crosses paths with the CEO in the future, RUN. You do not want to be associated with such an incompetent, cruel individual. You will only tarnish your own reputation in the process.

Pros

Work from home. “Flexibility” if you call flexibility working All the time and not making a living wage

Cons

Terrible pay, management constantly changing, under valued for work, CEO has no compassion.

Advice to Management

Get it together. Just, get it together.

Pros

you can work on your own, make your own hours, etc...

Cons

Payments for design projects are too low and payments are often 1-2 weeks late They closed the company with an email to designers, provided little to no support when many designers were left still working on projects while also not communicating to clients of the status of the company. Unsure if the company will ever be re-opened

Advice to Management

Be more truthful to your employees, that kind of respect and consideration costs nothing and would have been rewarded. Pick a strategy and then stick with it, work out the kinks and then improve it rather than changing direction and strategies every other month... This confuses your employees and clients... When projects become confusing... clients will leave because they don't want to pay to get frustrated. Pay your designers well for offering a unique and client-centric design experience. Going for the lowest prices to undercut or compete with similar companies makes you one of many rather than the one at the top leading the way. Dont fold a company right before the holidays without paying employees and then post a photo of you and your hubby getting onto a private plane...You are better than that... or at least we thought so.

Pros

- Small, so there are many opportunities - Pay is OK - Co-workers - It's a job and you get a pay check.

Cons

- Poor outlook - Bad benefits - Negotiate a good salary because raises are small, even for people getting excellent performance reviews - "Flex PTO" - Closely monitored. You will probably get to "have a chat" with your manager if you take more than 2 weeks. - Shared office space. We used to have a nice office but now we've been working out of a shared office space. - Short runway and difficult to raise money - Lack of strategy - Questionable decision making (everyone makes mistakes but this is bad) - CEO Lots of the reviews of the CEO are quite extreme/personal - I find it hard to believe that the CEO is using company money to furnish their house or other equally dubious claims. Why are there such a large number of people that feel so negatively about this company? Scary The company is in desperate need of leadership. Many leadership positions quit after short stints - what is the common factor? CEO There isn't really a need to elaborate, you've likely read the reviews and the warning bells are ringing.

Advice to Management

There are hard times & struggles - that's expected, it's a startup and most startups fail. Take some responsibility - you are the CEO. Ultimately, everything that happens at the company is your responsibility. Be honest. Company and board deserve honesty

Pros

Once upon a time, this was a decent way to make some extra money as a designer. But, the CEO insisted on pushing wholesale and passion projects (like a hideous “furniture line”) over what worked and listening to people who were experienced in the field. They also over-hired a lot of inexperienced and uneducated designers, lowered payouts, increased workloads and changed their policies to state that they could choose to not pay designers for their completed work. They began blocking and purging designers who spoke up against their unethical policies and have now run out of designers (proven by them publicly posting client files onto the Facebook group, sending emails begging designers to come back and spamming their auto-emails)

Cons

The CEO is a mess. Everyone is clearly terrified of her - yet she has learned absolutely nothing from the years of reviews on this site. The company has now downsized from one of the biggest offices in LA (really? When you pay your designers practically minimum wage, and frequently not at all? Shame on you) to a WeWork (which is a shared office space used by a lot of freelance and laptop-lifestyle workers) and seems to have barely anyone working there. About 90% of the designers have left the platform, either in protest of the disgusting practices or for being fired for asking for their contracted payouts and speaking out. The fraud is through the roof on this company - from fake reviews to stealing designer work. Run away.

Advice to Management

What’s the point? She’s not interested in constructive feedback. After this company closes, I sincerely hope you take some time to reflect on the decisions you made that led you there before you point fingers.