Workplace reviews and discussion: 艾美時尚國際有限公司

Dear job seekers,

This company is not entirely an option that should be ruled out, but interns, please do not come here. Even though you are paid by the hour, the work is still treated as if it were a responsibility-based position.

I previously held the internship position.

The company does indeed offer opportunities to meet many foreign models,

and being able to become friends with models from different countries is a very enjoyable experience.

Because of this job, I made friends with foreign models, and it changed the way I look at many things.

If you are a full-time employee, communicating with clients and handling related tasks can also be a very good job.

However, all work should be built on a good system.

Even if the system is not perfect, there should at least be one.

But our dear Amy Fashion

has absolutely no system whatsoever,

which is truly regrettable.

First, I will talk about my personal experience, and then we can discuss the company’s problems more broadly.

My job duties involved taking models to auditions and finding clients for the company by phone and online.

Note: They did not include negotiating business deals or discussing performance targets.

On the day of the interview, I could not find the location because it was on the fifth floor of an alleyway building with no doorbell.

Why did the doorbell only go up to the fourth floor?

You can imagine.

The boss was therefore preparing to move to a new office, which I will mention later.

That day, the accountant, who had to handle all kinds of miscellaneous tasks, came to receive me first. Then I was interviewed by the boss, and afterward I was asked to come back for a second interview with the boss’s mother, who was presumably the majority shareholder.

During my first interview with the boss, I already felt that something was strange. She faced me and spoke with me, yet at times seemed absent-minded. It was as if she wanted to get on familiar terms with me, but her attitude was also mixed with a dismissive air. Either way, it did not resemble the attitude one would expect from a supervisor, let alone a boss.

I later learned that this was simply her personality.

On my first day at work, I merely sat at my desk.

The boss gave me the company’s official websites and social-media accounts, as well as the shared email account.

She also gave me a client list that was more than 80 percent outdated. Even the addresses on it still referred to “Taipei County.”

The company had only been established for a little over two years.

The list had never been updated; more than half of the numbers were disconnected.

The rest were wrong numbers, contacts who had changed, or otherwise ancient information.

I was told to call every number on the list.

Next, I was told to send a large number of standardized, spam-like Facebook messages to every photographer, stylist, and others whom we could connect with.

Auditions were arranged entirely without warning. Full-time employees were normally sent out, but depending on the boss’s mood that day, I would be assigned to go to auditions.

I could accept all of the above, but the later Photoshop work was also extremely outrageous.

Sometimes photographers’ unedited files were simply handed to me with instructions to retouch them professionally—professionally.

🔴 Problems with the company’s client list

When I was calling the client list, another colleague in the office was calling the exact same list, and the boss herself was calling it too.

The difference was that my copy was especially old; everyone else had their own version on their computers that they had updated themselves.

Everyone was frantically calling the same numbers. Companies had to answer three calls a day from three different people at our company.

When I asked the boss about it, she said it did not matter if other people found it annoying; I was calling because I wanted to obtain the information myself.

Even though we were all from the same company, information was not shared at all. Everyone held onto their own list and called it obsessively, without developing new clients or caring about the clients’ feelings.

One colleague would even repeatedly call cooperating clients to confirm one thing after another, splitting matters that could have been resolved in a single call into multiple calls just to look busy.

🔴 Office location and environment

The rooftop addition was extremely hot, yet the air conditioning was not turned on. When Taipei experienced several days with temperatures in the 30s Celsius and perceived temperatures in the 40s, we were all sitting inside an oven.

I did not complain about having to climb to the fifth floor.

But the boss would always assign me without warning to go out for auditions or client meetings.

As someone representing the company and taking models out, I would put on a polite, presentable makeup look, but because the office had no air conditioning, it would all melt in the stuffiness. I would then go to auditions covered in sweat.

The models were also unable to turn on the air conditioning at night, even when unbearably hot, and had to sleep covered in sweat with only a fan blowing.

The next day, some would become ill, others would look unwell, and their skin would be in terrible condition. They could only try to manage it by exercising intensely at the gym and maintaining a balanced diet.

The office location was quite unsuitable, and the boss naturally knew that staying there would not be feasible if the company wanted to expand.

So she spent money buying the second floor on a nearby corner. After construction work, she had the walls opened up and hired an interior designer.

She told us that the company had never made any money, but the boss’s own brother let slip that the company had been profitable for a long time and was finally moving to a more respectable office.

🔴 Model management

As someone in another review mentioned, the boss charged the models a high daily rent of NT$600–700, but the models’ actual living space was extremely small and had no living room. The models could only chat with one another in the tiny hallway.

She even refused to let them turn on the air conditioning!

The boss kept giving the models motivational speeches, saying that the air conditioning would be turned on in June. May also involved many extremely hot, sleepless nights.

When you start working there, the boss and her most loyal employee will constantly brainwash you, saying that the models are young and very willful, especially the female models, who always make unreasonable demands. They will tell you many exaggerated stories, giving you a preconceived bias toward the models’ requests.

When a model became sick with a high fever because the air conditioning was not turned on and she had to sweat while relying on a fan, the boss’s response was actually to criticize her for not taking her work seriously. This model was clearly very dedicated and went straight to Taichung for work the day after falling ill.

The apartment was also nearly a ten-minute walk from Dingxi MRT Station. After work, we would close the kitchen, and the models were not provided with access to it at night or on holidays.

The models paid an extremely high monthly taxi allowance, which could only be used for taxis to auditions. It did not cover transportation to their jobs. They even had to absorb the cost themselves when they were required to arrive at Taipei Bus Station at four or five in the morning. They were given only NT$2,800 per week in spending money.

If you developed some affection for the models and felt these things were unfair, it would probably be impossible to stay in this job for long.

🔴 The boss’s aesthetic preferences and employee competition

I have to say that the boss’s aesthetic judgment is genuinely quite problematic.

If you are interested, you can look through the fan page’s past posts and examine all the model cards.

Every Facebook post had to be reviewed by the boss. She would nitpick the photographs taken by photographers. If a photograph had artistic lighting and shadows, she would say, “It’s too dark; you can’t see her face. Are there any other photos?”

She showed no respect for professional expertise and acted as if everything could be handled without any budget whatsoever.

For a job worth more than NT$10,000, she was unwilling even to pay NT$159 for athletic shorts as part of the wardrobe, insisting that she had a pair of athletic shorts at home that the model could wear. Why had she not said so earlier? In any case, those shorts became the company’s property.

The Russian model was so thin that she probably could not fit into shorts designed for your body type.

After dismissing a full-time colleague, the boss began aggressively demanding that I bring in signed contracts, telling me to set a goal of achieving tens of thousands in monthly sales.

After I reached twice the target, the promised bonus was treated as if it had never existed. She repeatedly said that I had misunderstood and that there was no such thing as a bonus.

She cultivated a colleague whose specialty was taking the last piece of the credit. The sales results we had been promised would be taken away; even if you were a full-time employee, the clients you contacted would be aggressively called by this colleague and taken over.

But don’t worry—you do not need to report it to the boss. She will tell you that clients were taken away because your abilities were insufficient and that you need to build up your skills. When the company makes money, everyone makes money.