Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
What's genuinely good here is easy to name: colleagues who show up for each other far beyond what's expected, real ownership and responsibility from day one, a fast learning curve, and exposure to more of the business than most jobs at this stage would ever offer. For anyone wanting hands-on startup experience, it's hard to find a better place to get it. That's exactly what makes the rest of this review so disappointing to write: the raw material for something exceptional is genuinely here, talented people, a strong brand, a real market opportunity, and instead of being built on, it's being steadily eroded by leadership decisions that don't match the ambition the company still likes to talk about publicly. It's not a lack of potential that's the problem here. It's watching that potential go unrealized, again and again, by choices that were entirely avoidable.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
The founders stepping back from day-to-day leadership marked a clear turning point — the culture that followed prioritizes growth above almost everything else, and everything in this review stems from that shift.
At least four team leads and head-ofs with medium-to-long tenure have left within a short window, often without succession planning or any communication about who's now responsible — treated as isolated events rather than something leadership reflects on, as if institutional knowledge and experienced people are simply replaceable.
No HR department, and no independent point of contact for employees at all — no mechanism exists to even surface these problems, let alone address them.
Leadership speaks publicly about fair pay and empowerment while running one of the lower-paying companies I've worked for, including relative to male-led organizations.
Employee input is solicited and then ignored when it doesn't match executive leadership's own preference, and announced benefits are repeatedly promised and never delivered — consultation and communication that look genuine on the surface but aren't.
Leadership holds employees to standards of ownership and accountability it doesn't consistently apply to itself.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Benchmark salaries against the market and pay people fairly.
Build an HR department employees can actually trust.
Deliver on announced benefits, or don't announce them until they're ready.
Treat employee surveys as genuine input rather than a formality — if the answer is already decided, don't ask the question.
Increase transparency around organizational changes and strategic decisions, and stop treating departures as isolated events.
Invest in retaining experienced employees before replacing them becomes the default solution.
Give local executive leadership greater autonomy and accountability rather than concentrating decisions with the parent company.
Apply the same standards of ownership and accountability to executive leadership that are expected of everyone else.
Ensure company values are reflected internally as consistently as they are communicated externally.
Celebrate the wins more internally, employees want to feel part of the success story.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Increasingly tense atmosphere around organizational change, with a growing gap between the company's external image and what employees actually experienced.
Many junior managers were inexperienced and visibly overwhelmed by their responsibilities.
Accountability was inconsistent; underperformance was often tolerated while high performers were simply given more work.
Image
Extremely polished public image that didn't always reflect internal reality; externally, the brand leans heavily on messaging around female empowerment, sustainability and modern leadership, but internally that wasn't reflected at all.
Products are marketed heavily around a European identity, in my view inconsistent with some of the alleged manufacturing realities.
The gap between public messaging and internal decision-making is what makes it disappointing — the potential here is real. If leadership recognizes this messaging is compelling enough to attract customers, that alone suggests they see real value in it — it would be great to see that value actually lived internally, not just marketed externally.
Public success stories — being a female-led business, a high-growth D2C startup, having a high-end office in the center of Munich — are frequently highlighted externally in a way that overshadows the internal challenges employees were actually navigating. Employees would love to feel part of the success story. :)
Work-Life-Balance
Fast-paced, growth-first environment; expectations increase noticeably with seniority.
High ownership isn't always matched with recognition or additional support, and additional responsibilities are often added to a role over time without any corresponding increase in support.
Reasonable for junior roles; balance decreases the further up the reporting line you go.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Career progression lacks transparency; promotions and title changes don't always come with corresponding pay, and long-term career paths remain unclear.
Limited structured development — employees are often expected to "figure things out" rather than receive real coaching on a larger level. Team leads and Head Of's absorb some of this, but support from executive leadership with structural incentives is lacking.
Promotion criteria varied significantly by team, with no consistent company-wide standard — this left noticeable knowledge and seniority gaps between people holding the same title (e.g. two "Senior Managers" or two "Team Leads" could have very different levels of experience or responsibilities behind the title).
The departure of experienced team leads and head-ofs meaningfully reduced mentorship opportunities for those still there.
Gehalt/Benefits
Salaries significantly below market, with raises often delayed for months and, for many, essentially nonexistent despite growing responsibility.
New benefits are announced with enthusiasm but repeatedly fail to materialize — a Foodji machine was announced at the beginning of March and a JobRad program at the beginning of May; as of early August, neither had actually appeared, and follow-up questions are met with requests to "be patient."
Leadership speaks publicly about female empowerment and fair pay; internally, this is one of the lowest-paying companies I've worked for, including relative to male-led organizations, despite substantial revenues that are bragged about publicly. They clearly see enough value in the female empowerment narrative to build public messaging around it — it would be good to see that same conviction show up in actual compensation.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Sustainability is discussed externally far more than it's practiced internally, and manufacturing/supply chain realities don't always match the marketing.
Very little evidence of meaningful environmental initiatives on the ground.
Growth consistently takes priority over social responsibility, and the company has faced public criticism over aspects of its product marketing and communication.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
Genuinely one of the company's greatest strengths. Teams with Junior, mid-level and Senior managers, as well as their team leads and head-ofs consistently went above and beyond for each other, even under increasing pressure from above.
Some of my best professional relationships were built here. High turnover is the main thing that makes long-term team stability difficult.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Hard to assess given how young the workforce skews, very few long-tenured employees remain, and retention is an ongoing issue.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
This criticism is aimed at executive leadership, not head-ofs or team leads, whose quality and effort varied far less.
Several senior leadership hires appeared to lack the management experience their level of responsibility called for, and communication from parts of executive leadership was often unclear, compounded by language barriers.
Department heads left without succession planning or handover multiple times, not just occasionally, with no communication at all — employees were simply left wondering who to reach out to and who was actually responsible now that a given department head was gone. A striking contrast to the ownership and accountability standard executive leadership expects from everyone else.
Experienced employees frequently left without equivalent replacements, which created the impression that institutional knowledge and experienced people were viewed as easily replaceable.
Many strategic decisions clearly originated with executive leadership or the parent company, leaving local management with limited real influence.
Arbeitsbedingungen
No HR department (also in this team, members on disappeared without any communications) and no independent point of contact for employee concerns, which left people without support during periods of change.
Existing teams were repeatedly expected to absorb departing colleagues' workload rather than receive additional support.
Compensation and benefits did not match the expectations placed on employees more broadly.
Kommunikation
Information is shared selectively and difficult topics are often avoided; departures of experienced people were communicated minimally, if at all, with no transparency on succession or how responsibilities were redistributed. Employees were frequently left to work out project ownership themselves.
Executive leadership consistently emphasizes ownership and accountability as values employees should live by, yet several project owners and department leads themselves left without any meaningful transition: a standard not applied evenly.
Employee surveys on business decisions were sometimes disregarded entirely. When staff were asked to choose between flexible or fixed desk assignments, the near-unanimous vote was for fixed seating, the company went with flexible seating anyway, allegedly because that was C-level's preference. It made the consultation process feel performative rather than genuine.
External communication is noticeably more polished than internal communication, reinforcing an "us vs. them" feeling between executive leadership and staff.
Gleichberechtigung
Public diversity messaging doesn't always align with the internal experience.
I personally witnessed discussions around racial representation that made me uncomfortable.
Some hiring decisions gave the impression that personal networks were prioritized over objective selection.
Interessante Aufgaben
One of the strongest parts of working here. Real ownership from an early stage, a fast learning curve, and exposure across many parts of the business. A genuinely excellent place to gain scale-up experience and make a real impact.