Vantaggi
The people that I met in my many years at Hurley were by far what kept me around so long. There is so much strong talent in the stores and the former District Manager for Texas/East Coast developed strong leaders and challenged us to succeed, which was such a great working environment. The retail division is so small that all the store managers in the US know eachother, which can make for really awesome opportunities and connections. You feel a part of the brand as the corporate team is very involved in the stores and managers are flown to HQ every year for a conference. The salary and incentives for Store Managers are the best I have seen for any retailer of similar volume. There is also the whole Nike affiliation which comes with nice discounts and benefits.
Svantaggi
The last year I was there, everything began to go downhill. The stores and entire retail division were doing extremely well, but they began to scale back in unnecessary ways. The first red flag being that they kept the VP of Retail position vacant for over a year. They also consolidated all US stores to 1 district manager(1 person for 35 stores) and in doing so, lost one of their most valuable employees in the retail field. We were constantly promised the potential of new store openings, which would create opportunities for growth. But we were lucky if they decided to open 1 new store per year, despite the financial success and hard work of the store teams.The politics and cliques are absurd and the corporate team will cover each other’s backs until they have to throw someone under the bus. I truly loved this company for many of my years there, but am saddened to see the way things continue to play out.