Good opportunity to make friends; questionable opportunity for employment - Avis employé Graphic Designer Fuzzco

I worked with Fuzzco for just over four years and am proud to say the projects I was thrown on are still my proudest pieces to date. The portfolio you develop working at Fuzzco is incomparable to other companies. I was fortunate enough to work on a variety of high profile projects as well as the mom and pop shops around town. These excited us the most, because of the relationships we were able to build with these clients, which bettered the overall process and work experience. I got to work with an amazing crew of directors, designers, developers and project managers and met some incredible friends through the company. To this date my best piece of advice for college students is to find a small firm where your voice can make a difference and where you can continuing exploring creative styles. Fuzzco offered that opportunity, which gave me confidence in the work I could produce.

Fuzzco was a young company with five employees when I joined the team. I became the sixth, and from there was able to witness some amazing hires and some not so amazing hires as we grew. Growing pains! It is a fast paced environment, but we all pushed each other to do great work. We learned to strengthen our communication and through that became far closer and tighter. Differences in opinion do come up, but they come up in every company, the difference here is you’re close enough to the owners to hear each other out, whereas bigger firms would often nix that opportunity.

The designers on staff are amazing, great people Clients were cool

Where to start? They literally try to control your entire life: no freelance policy on top of bad pay and less-than-inflation raises, bad PTO policy, non-existant sick leave, below average perks, and constantly cutting and combating the ones people do like (they cut our conference stipend, for example). The culture is toxic, mostly from the top/middle-management down. It's micromanagement, creative steamrolling ("just do what i say"), constant comparison to other designers on the team, unrealistic timeline/work output expectations are the norm and make you feel like you're underperforming or not doing enough or just bad at your job. They'll steal your ideas and sell them on their store, and take credit for them in magazines/on social, anywhere else they can. They refuse to let you post work on your website or socials unless they've posted it first (but sometimes they never get around to posting it.) If they have retreats, gifts, events that celebrate the staff they are extremely low-budget in the name of being quaint/twee/funny, despite owners being extremely wealthy. I could go on.. do not recommend.