The company has been in existence for over 30 years and I can’t even pinpoint when it started to go bad. What I do know is that now we have such low morale because of the constant layoffs, a culture of egotism, and the upper management that will always be “good ole boys club”. We have management that insists on keeping employees that have no value and barely contribute! The only thing saving these employees is flat out FAVORITISM! This company is no longer the type of company I believed in and I am working on getting out asap.
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Agree with Very Anonymous, but I say Started in 2013 the Execs were trying to elevate Fossil brand itself, like it’s fashion license partners. LOL - Swiss made trying to be relevant, raised prices on all goods to seem more premium. Believed the good times and high stock prices would never end.
Hired bunch of VP level and up for various new business units /depts, and hired outside consultants like crazy, especially if they had cozy relationships with those new Execs. the further higher ups never relocated to DFW. they were still living on East/ West coasts and commuting to TX, or had corporate apartment in town for the work week but went Home on weekends. And regular people supposed to believe these jokers were fully committed to the company, yet unwilling to relocate to a ‘flyover’ state.
And then lots of JCP Execs joined in, and gutted the IT Dept globally to use foreign contract workers/ global consulting firm Infosys - basically the origin of Fossil on this very layoff forum!!
"Very Anonymous" nailed it.
Very anonymous has it exactly right....MK growth hid flat.growth and bad decisions elswhere
Went wrong around 2014. Not recognizing the Kors growth as us simply riding a fashion trend and believing instead we could / would / should become a 5B$ company. Instead of investing that windfall in better processes and tools and more connection between teams and people, we went the other way with a bigger building, disconnected teams, no org chart and no way to improve anything from the middle, executives who do nothing but manage their direct reports rather than shaping their teams and supporting how they can best work with other teams. Not sticking with the brief times we actually did math - like Margin Maniacs, "The world has changed" "the world has changed 2" (anyone still left who remembers how we spelled those acronyms? TWHAC? THWAC?). Barely training only people working at the time on new softwares, like PLM, and just leaving all remaining training to whoever is there when new people start - like SAP. Not holding anyone accountable, especially brands to budgets; most especially one brand. Dividing everything up by brand rather than using expertise to support all brands. It is like a company that only wanted to do the fun stuff, but not do the structure, process, tools, discipline, math, business stuff. This is a long time coming, and changing things that don't matter enough while not changing things that could matter a lot is probably not the answer; cutting chopped up, ineffective teams past the bone while leaving them connected only by luck and who still knows who is left and where they are probably won't save this, no matter how much talent and skill remain. Still, the job you have is better than the job you don't have yet.
Get out and get out fast. Best decision I've ever made.
When you don’t reinvest in your core competencies and have a visionless leader this happens. Two companies come to mind Nike and Apple. They too were born around the same time, but they reinvested in design engineering in a big way. All of them benefited from economies of scale and new markets. It’s recognizing that markets will turn but you’ve already built up the intellectual capital, design visionaries, engineering talent to take the lead and buffer against this.
It’s also a handicap when you hire your niece to run your design department, and keep chums around because they whisper good things in your ear. It’s this inability to fire and hire key personnel at will to adapt to shifting market conditions that speaks to a loyalty to wishful thinking above maximizing value creation.
Keep your healthcare as long as possible, as long as you can bare being there. It’s not like your walking into a ripe market.