'...she started to feel like the mission was just a smokescreen to get employees to work harder and longer.'
Avery felt out of place at Away. Like many of the executives at the popular direct-to-consumer luggage brand, she’d gone to an Ivy League college, worked at a popular startup, and honed an intense work ethic that set her apart from the pack. But the higher-ups, who were almost all white and straight, still never gave her the time of day. “It was very clear who was in the clique,” she says.
The rules had been implemented in the name of transparency, but employees say they created a culture of intimidation and constant surveillance. Once, when a suitcase was sent out with a customer’s incomplete initials stenciled onto the luggage tag, CEO Steph Korey said the person in charge must have been “brain dead” and threatened to take over the project. “Slack bullying is a thing,” explains a former member of the creative team we’ll call Erica*.
Korey disputes ever using the terms “racist” and “hate speech,” although multiple sources confirmed these were the words she used.The situation bruised employee morale, according to leaked Slack logs and interviewsconducted with 14 former workers. But it was consistent with a pattern of behavior from the company’s top leaders.
Korey, for her part, didn’t have to work hard to project an aspirational lifestyle. The CEO grew up in Ohio in a 55,000-square-foot historic mansion When the photo team took suitcases to a shoot in the Hamptons and brought them back banged up and covered in sand, an employee who’d started that week was blamed for the “unacceptable” error and called out publicly on Slack. “It could’ve just been a co-worker pulling them aside and saying this isn’t cool,” Erica says. “It felt like they were publicly outing the situation so that everybody could follow along.
In practice, however, it did the opposite. Transparency seemed like it was just a pretense for Korey to micromanage and exert control. Marginalized employees felt silenced by the cutthroat environment and executives like Korey who used mistakes as an excuse to nitpick. “Steph has the drive and the personality of someone who could be very successful,” Erica says. “She embodies what we all aspire to be. But she does it in a way that’s absolutely not what I want to be.
From the beginning, Korey and Rubio were masterful at getting these young employees hyped up about their jobs. “You are joining a movement,” they would say. “Everyone wants to be a part of this.” Lauren and the 12 other associates on customer experience felt lucky, even chosen. They worked long hours and bonded over crazy customer stories, intoxicated by the energy of the company.
Korey is careful to point out that working on New Year’s had been a choice. “The team decided they’d prefer to work the holiday and get a month off because the team knew this day was really important for keeping the customer experience on track,” she said in an email toEven so, Caroline and her co-workers were suspicious about the executive’s motives. No one had received overtime pay — which, given the hours they were working, seemed questionable — and many suspected the CEO was concerned.
Lila asked a direct report to explain the strategy to Korey since she was going to be on the way to the airport. The idea was to expedite shipping on late orders and communicate to customers when they could expect to receive their bags. Lila’s report noted this was going “above and beyond.” Caroline was protective of how close her team had become. If one person was forced to stay, the rest were likely to follow suit. “They exploited the fact that we were close,” she says. “They knew we would take a bullet for each other and they just used it. Everyone was crushed. But they weren’t going to leave if their friends stayed.”
Korey says these “spot checks” are a typical part of any retail company. “This isn’t the only area we do this,” she adds. “In fact, we use secret shoppers at our retail stores, and we regularly place multiple combinations of e-commerce orders to ensure our fulfillment facilities are packing orders correctly.”
Korey said her messages were necessary to get the team back on track. “Managing people brings with it the responsibility to invest time and energy into providing thoughtful context around performance expectations and feedback,” she wrote in a statement toDays after Korey’s 3AM tirade, she announced that she was hiring a buffer to put between herself and the team: a vice president of customer experience, Monte Williams. The associates were thrilled.
Once, a team member tried to explain that managers didn’t handle as many customer emails because they were charged with leading the team. But Korey didn’t buy it. “I’m just going to be honest here, your response to me reads like [the managers] don’t really do anything positive for the business anyway so it doesn’t matter if they’re here or not,” she said.
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