Pros
The office is beautiful and the discount allows you to purchase their high priced clothing guilt-free. The new leaders in the organization are breathing new life into this stodgy old company. Aritzia focuses on hiring the best people and does a really great job of it. Most of the office staff have a high level of schooling and / or an exceptional career pedigree and it is great to work with people like this.
Cons
1) Uninspiring and dysfunctional leadership team. The amount of micro-management and the inability to lead others are sentiments often lamented upon by my colleagues. It is typical to see managers and executives working on junior level work, totally disregarding the needs of their teams. Of particular note are the executives who have worked their way up in the organization. They appear oblivious to their own shortcomings but would benefit greatly from leadership training and coaching. 2) Work / life imbalance. If you wish to move ahead at Aritzia, you should expect to work more than your contracted hours per week. Forty-five to fifty hours at an employee level and you would be considered average. Fifty-five to sixty-five hours average for management, more for everyone during peak business periods or if you wish to be recognized as for advancement. You may have above average pay when you get hired but when you factor in your expected overtime, the pay really is not that great. 3) Lack of technology. The company is in desperate need of technology to assist with data collection, manipulation, interpretation, storage, retrieval, and dissemination. Instead, employees do much of this non-value added work manually, which makes up a significant chunk of each employee's work day, management and executives included. 4) Lack of innovation and empowerment. This company is far behind the pack when it comes to innovation and it would take a radical change to get this company out front where it wants to be. It's not because of a lack of talent. In fact, there are some pretty exceptional people here. It's the culture of micromanagement (otherwise known as How We Work) that has stagnated the whole company. Empowerment does not exist here. Don't expect decisions to be made, for even the most simple problems, without exhaustive and belaboured efforts. Even then, all decisions will be made by someone at an executive level, most likely the CEO. In an office of 350+ employees, this creates bottlenecks and waste everywhere. Sadly, the top jobs are given to those who are great at creating reports using the right font, text size, and paragraph formatting.
