For six years I worked for an Australian cosmetics brand with a reputation of being a bit of a cult. I wasn’t the usual recruit – you might describe me as a former theatre kid, with a dash of recovering horse girl. The company I worked for was known for its demure and self-serious marketing campaigns; for unflinching eye contact; for a religious devotion to personal care. Perhaps you know the brand I’m referring to. Perhaps you even know someone with the same story as me: someone who went from casual employee to dedicated, dewy-skinned disciple.
Throughout my time at the company, tying my linen pinafore before a shift felt like slipping into the costume of a well-known cartoon character. In fact, working on the brand’s frontline – the immaculately dusted retail stores – resembled a job at Disneyland in more ways than one: its strict code of conduct, its obsession with ritual and its insistence that perfection was possible between the hours of 10 and six. Outside work my life was chaotic and grubby but behind the store’s grand brass tester sink I became someone else.
I began my tenure working at one of the smallest retail stores alongside a group of jewellery designers, film-makers, poets and painters. The store in our care rarely made more than $1,000 a day, which meant we spent most of our time polishing bottles and trading stories. Often the daily take was contingent on one wealthy woman deciding that she needed to restock her mind-boggling number of bathrooms: the city apartment, the beach house, the Airbnb and her son’s new rental.
The customers who frequented this store had more money than sense, although they were kind and rarely in a hurry. I attributed this to the fact that many of them did not have jobs. Working at this store rarely felt like a job to me, so I wondered if I could count myself as one of them.
Then I transferred to a city store – the flagship – which was not something to be taken lightly. It was a place to build a career. I’d learned the art of sink demonstrations but at the flagship I perfected it. Dispense all product on to your skin first, maintain contact with the customer’s hand at all times, use a firm, assured pressure.
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The flagship store’s customers were so familiar with the brand that I wondered if they were assessing our abilities and reporting back to the training team – a group of charismatic, God-like women who had achieved sink demonstration mastery. I was working at the city store when I met the brand’s chief customer officer. I shook her hand for what I felt was an appropriate amount of time and, as I pulled away, she clamped down on my palm. She decided when the handshake was over. It was exhilarating.
After my time at the flagship store I left the company for an overseas trip. I bounced around a few odd jobs upon my return, including a stint at a smaller, copycat brand that took Fair Work regulations as mere suggestion.
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Eventually, I begged my former employer to take me back and, after some convincing, the company found a position for me. It was at a shopping centre on the city fringe, which was not a huge distance from the company’s head office, but it attracted the stigma of being far from anything worth visiting. As such, the brand’s leadership team never made the journey. Although our conscientious store manager tried her best, we were largely left to our own devices. The self-fulfilling prophecy of banishment took hold. We let our on-brand affectations slip.
Our bad attitudes, by upper management’s standards, were surprisingly effective in communicating with customers. Addressing the shopping centre crowd with pomp and circumstance would attract raucous laughter. “I just want my soap, love,” customers would cry as we listed the benefits of the brand’s latest skincare release. We tallied the number of people who wandered into the store just to ask us why our products were so expensive. They were rarely rude – it was a genuine question, one we struggled to answer.
Before my time in the linen pinafore, I believed that a job – any job – at a company like this would quell my existential distress. As if merely being associated with an aspirational, culture-focused B Corp could rid my life of friction.
What I discovered was that the friction only intensified over time. I didn’t want to become a product copywriter, contrary to every conversation I had with my store manager and HR representative. I wanted to write jokes about copywriting.
I left the company in 2023 and, although I’m still mourning the loss of my staff discount, my life feels more cohesive now.
I spend a lot of my time writing jokes. And very little thinking about the skin’s barrier function.
Chloe Elisabeth Wilson is the author ofRytual(Penguin, RRP A$34.99)