Working at LUSH // My Experience

As promised, in this post I will be talking about my employment working with the cosmetics company LUSH. I’ve spoken about it a lot, both on this blog and to other people (who are probably sick of me talking about it by now) but I wanted to put my whole experience into one place, and hopefully let others know (who may be considering working for this company in the future) how I found it and to help them. So here we go…

My contract with LUSH was a Christmas one, so I worked from the 8th of November til the 20th of December. My shifts were both Saturday and Sundays, 7am-3pm. Yes, that meant I had to get up at 6 on the weekends. Wasn’t fun walking to work in the cold and dark. I can tell you.

The reason I had such odd shifts was because I worked in the LUSH factory, not in a store. My employment was in the Gifts Department, which basically meant that I was packing, wrapping, bowing and tagging all those pretty, nice and expensive boxes full of your favourite products. (You’re welcome, by the way.)

I worked with around 100 other people at the start, many young people my age just looking to gain some Christmas money, some older people and many Romanian, Polish, Spanish people and many more from all over. I found this really interesting and met some really amazing people through this. (I will also be writing a post about this and my opinion on the idea that foreign people are “stealing our jobs!!” as UK citizens (the short and short of it is: I think that’s bollocks)).

Overall, my experience working for the company and in the department was a very positive one! I feel that the company treated us with a lot of respect, understood our needs as employees and the managers and team leaders always treated the rest of us as equals. I had a three hour group induction before I started, where I had manual handling (lifting heavy stuff) training (basically where we watched a video of how to lift something and had to lift a box in front of the rest of the group) and got told all about the company, it’s history, some of the most popular products and the ethics of the ingredients (which are seriously important to the company and I was very impressed).

My job at the factory was pretty simple: turn up on time, go to a station and do it properly. At times this was stressful as obviously the run up to Christmas is a very busy time and there were certain quotas that had to be met every week. However as weekend staff, we were told that the pressure is less on us and more on the staff in the week, we were just picking up where they couldn’t carry on. With the 8-hour shift we had three breaks, 15 minutes at 9:00, half an hour at 11:00 for lunch and another 15 at 1:00. I felt this was really efficient for working as it gave us time to have a drink, food, etc without putting you off going back in and it sounds really stupid but I just thought that was really important as they understood that standing and doing something for four hours straight without a break would have made us want to die.

Another reason I was so happy with my time was the help I received. If i didn’t enjoy a part of the work I could move to another station if I asked and help out there instead. As well as this, whenever I had any questions, needed a day off (which I had once as I had my last shift at my previous job, and one for illness), the people in the office were extremely helpful and kind. I also had problems with tax (I shouldn’t be taxed anything) and I inquired about it, thinking I would have to ring the tax office myself but no, they sorted it all out for me and I was very happy with the help I received.

I was quite upset that I was not offered a permanent position but obviously there were a lot of us and only a few positions available at the end, and the people they chose were very deserving. I will definitely be keeping an eye on the LUSH careers website for any more positions for the company, as I could not be happier with my time there. Thank you, LUSH!

That’s all from me I guess. If you have any more questions about the job and what came with it, please do put a comment and ask so I can answer!

I will also soon be posting a “Top Lush Products” or something along those lines in the next couple of weeks (she says). So keep your eyes peeled for that!

Thanks for reading, stay awesome,

Jess xx