I was a Christmas hire at the Eaton Center location (their busiest North American store, also one of the smallest), and ended up staying on for a little over a year and a half, until my work visa expired. I stand by my opinions for that store specifically, but I met enough of the Queen St staff to be pretty confident that working there is a similarly positive experience.


Retail work is by nature stressful (sometimes), but my time at LUSH was largely enjoyable despite that. I felt that feedback on my performance was generally well handled so that I felt valued even while receiving criticism, the coaching was helpful, and the compensation decent for a part time retail gig (and the occasional box of free products was really welcome!). The core staff were all great people, as were the other Christmas hires that stayed on. Scheduling generally respected people's preferences, though all bets are off in the buildup to Christmas. The only times I'd go to work dreading a shift were the days I didn't sleep well, which isn't the company's fault, I generally perked up once I got there. I usually left work feeling a little exhausted but positive in mood.


The training was very thorough and focused on customer service and product knowledge as much as sales, which you really appreciate when you have an irate customer interrogating you as to why a product has a preservative in it that the internet has told her is carcinogenic.


There are occasional moments when you can tell the company has more hippies and art majors than engineers and business majors (hey, let's make this display piece out of wood, and put dry ice in it. Wood doesn't warp, right?!), but overall I loved it there (despite going into the job as a very non-hippie, meat-eating, non-tree hugging, shirt-tucked-in type), and they seem to be doing pretty well as a business in spite of the occasional glitch.


The products themselves are (mostly) great, generally work as well as claimed, and are reasonably priced once you account for where, how and from what they are made. Knowing this meant I didn't feel too bad trying to sell as much as possible; I don't think I'd have been able to bring quite as much genuine enthusiasm to the sales side of things if the products were crud. Some products (fresh face masks, certain massage bars) are all natural, but NOT all products are. One thing that did bug me was the occasional over-enthusiastic colleague accidentally implying otherwise, though this was pretty rare, and it was definitely not policy to intentionally mis-represent anything (the ingredients are listed lots of places pretty clearly, and tell you what is and isn't synthetic).


I'm sure there are bad stores and managers out there,it's to big a company for that not to be the case, but overall LUSH seems like a company that cares about it's staff, and about what they stand for. They aren't everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure there are some perfectly reasonable human beings out there that can't stand the place, or who just aren't interested in what LUSH stands for; but if you aren't the kind of person that gets all cynical reading their "What we believe" statement, and can summon at least some genuine enthusiasm about mostly natural, vegetarian/vegan, handmade cosmetics, then it's a great place to work.


I think the biggest compliment I can pay them is to say that a year on from my last LUSH paycheck, I'm still happily recommending their products to people, using them myself, and seeing facebook posts from former co-workers to the effect of "I love my employer". I can only think of a couple of other chains of retail stores where the staff seem that happy.

Posted on 20 August 2014 by Rater #13 | Flag as inappropriate

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