Former Rent The Runway Employees Compare the Company to ‘Mean Girls’

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Rent the Runway sounds like a terrible place to work, according to a number of high-level executives who have all departed the company within the past 10 months. Fortune reports that the company's chief operating officer, chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, chief creative officer, chief technology officer, chief people officer, and head of partnerships have all recently departed due to an incredibly stressful work environment; multiple former employees drew Mean Girls comparisons.

"The culture is unpredictable and erratic," one anonymous former employee tells Fortune's Daniel Roberts. "Everybody knew and talked about it amongst themselves, but it was never formally acknowledged. It's not like there were complaints to HR. People were too afraid. There wasn't even really an HR."

According to the report, there's a private Facebook support group called "Rent the Runaways" dedicated to people who have previously worked at Rent the Runway and are suffering from PTSD, as one group member puts it. The group currently has 96 members.

Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman denied the claims to Fortune, saying that it's nothing like the Mean Girls atmosphere that former employees described. "It's extremely disappointing to hear because I care so much about the culture and about every single person who I've ever hired," she tells Roberts. "This has been by far the most emotional, difficult year of my career."

More employee horror stories abound on Glassdoor, where one customer service representative describes being reprimanded for not using enough exclamation points in her emails and another reviewer says senior leadership is "a nightmare."