Behind the Eyes of Each Lisa Frank Beast Lurks the Malevolent Darkness of Poor Labor Practices

At Jezebel, Tracie Egan Morrissey went deep on the “rainbow gulag” behind Lisa Frank:

An interoffice, bimonthly publication called “Frankly Speaking” [left] informed employees how they were to behave, particularly regarding how they were expected to interact with their boss, CEO James Green. Memos were frequently circulated with new, increasingly restrictive company policies. No visitors, including family members, were allowed. The penalty for any violations ranged from verbal abuse to name-calling to screaming to automatic termination to even more bizarre restrictions. (One time, after discovering that someone left the office 10 minutes early, an enraged Green instructed the warehouse manager to put chains and padlocks on all the downstairs doors so that “the staff can’t escape.”)

There is also this really terrible anecdote from earlier in the piece:

Frank’s entrepreneurial instinct first kicked in during her time at the University of Arizona, where she would purchase handmade pottery and jewelry from local Native American communities and sell them at a markup back home in Michigan. Frank did so well that she eventually started directing the artists on what kind of jewelry to make. “If I said ‘Make a teddy bear or a unicorn,’ that was what sold,” she told UO.

[Jezebel]