“Felt Like a Game Show”: Inside Highsnobiety’s Sudden Layoffs of 51 Employees

The luxury streetwear publication leveraged brand deals and e-commerce into meteoric growth. Then, the pandemic hit.

Last year, Highsnobiety was hitting its stride. The hypebeast-targeted streetwear publisher that began as a blog for male sneakerheads in 2005 had grown past its humble origins: in May, they launched an e-commerce shop with an exclusive Prada Linea Rossa capsule collection; moved into a sprawling, newly built headquarters in Berlin; and, by August, released their second book, a holographic tome titled The New Luxury: Defining the Aspirational in the Age of Hype.

For much of that year, I freelanced for their booming branded content division. New employees seemed to spring up overnight; across the office, cheers would erupt from the commerce team as their latest drop on the e-commerce site sold out within minutes. It felt like a golden era for the brand. But when your business model is built around aspirational hype and luxury goods, there’s no contingency plan for the global economy grinding to a halt because of a pandemic. The coronavirus crisis has destabilized the media industry, and on Monday, the crisis hit Highsnobiety as 51 employees were laid off without warning. (According to a Wired report, the company had more than a hundred employees two months ago.)

Described by a number of sources, including some who were laid off, the situation inside Highsnobiety reflected the uncertainty and fear facing workers across the industry. Last week, as the company showed off employees’ home office setups for Highsnobiety’s 3.3 million Instagram followers and announced a collection of $50 T-shirts that explored “themes of Beauty, Lovers, The Intangibles, Strength and The End,” the company’s COO, Juergen Hopfgartner, stepped in for CEO and founder David Fischer (who was recovering from coronavirus) at an all-staff Zoom meeting and listed options for what the company could do to prevent layoffs. “They said that kurzabeit [“short time,” reduced-hours work] would be the most reasonable option and we would find out more details the following week,” a staffer explained. By the end of the meeting, they had a feeling people would be laid off regardless. “They had already cut freelancers prior to the meeting and I had a feeling some new hires who were on probation trials would also be gone.”

On Monday morning, an all-hands meeting for the commerce team appeared in their calendars with no explanation. One member thought that they were going to talk about upcoming projects they had planned, but as they logged into Zoom and saw their entire team was joined by Fischer as well as the HR department, reality set in. According to a source who was on the call, Fischer explained that, while he was proud of the accomplishments at commerce, after a lot of deliberation, they decided that the division couldn’t exist because brands and vendors refused to ship items or even do production. “He said he would announce [the news] at the company-wide meeting later on and then he disappeared,” but never clarified who on the commerce team would be laid off, the source said.

During this interim period before the company-wide, 130-person Zoom meeting later that day, some employees cried at home, thinking they’d been fired, while others received phone calls from the heads of their departments letting them know they’d been let go. As one employee explained: “That was the most horrible day in a long time.”

With the news filtering through departments, the layoffs left an ominous cloud over the entire company. Staffers anxiously waited to see if they’d get the call that they’d been laid off. It “felt like a game show,” said one employee — albeit one that played out remotely. One high-ranking editor, who had worked at the company for years, left a public Slack message expressing his outrage at the situation before the message and his entire account were swiftly deleted. By the end of the day, 51 employees were fired. For those who had been with the company for more than a decade, the news hit especially hard. One of the longtime employees who was laid off had also seen their partner lose their job the week before due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The workers still at Highsnobiety were told that the strategy for survival will include higher-ups taking pay cuts while other workers go part-time or, in some cases, are furloughed until June.

What happened at Highsnobiety on Monday is not an isolated incident. It’s an indication of how quickly the ground is shifting for new media companies, especially those heavily invested in brand-sponsored, hype-based journalism. A business model laser-focused on shilling a lifestyle of “new luxury” via designer goods and overpriced apparel, it seems, is only as good as the economy health of its global readership.

Of course, it’s not just fashion websites whose business models are collapsing. Highsnobiety serves as an allegory for the entire industry’s woes. Regional newspapers are going under because local businesses are pulling advertising, and publications like Eater, whose entire business model revolved around restaurants, are being forced to pivot to new coverage areas. The already precarious tightrope walk of journalism doesn’t feel one step away from disaster anymore; it feels like we’re falling.

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