By Denise Heard-Bashur
I recently learned a Wisconsin-based company wants to buy Helen of Troy. As a former employee, I immediately remembered the people I used to work with, and how little the company seemed to think they were worth by the end.
I joined Helen of Troy’s creative department in early 2013. For a graphic designer in El Paso, it was the job. There were dozens of qualified creatives for every decent design position in the city, a ratio that hasn’t changed much. I was hired at double my previous pay, with substantial benefits and a 40-hour week. At a time when life at home was chaotic, that office became my haven.
The creative department was extraordinary. Highly educated, deeply experienced, consistently excellent, and many of us had been underpaid and overworked at other local employers before landing there. We were treated with respect and trust. We could have fun and still turn out remarkable work. That’s rare here, and we knew it.
The company around us was alive: a building full of hundreds of employees, above-market pay and holiday celebrations that felt like family reunions. Helen of Troy’s logo was stamped around the city for major causes it supported and sponsored.
Under Julien Mininberg, who became CEO in 2014, the company trimmed its portfolio, bought Hydro Flask and grew. When COVID hit, he took the biggest pay cut himself to spare the lowest-paid workers entirely.
As Mininberg prepared to retire, a new chief operating officer arrived as his successor in 2022. At her first town hall here, the president of my business unit, a Californian who loved this city, implored her to remember how valuable the company’s El Paso workforce was. My department exchanged looks. We knew what that kind of plea meant.
In mid-2023, we were told the creative, marketing and engineering departments were leaving El Paso for a new office to be built in Boston, a casualty of the company’s Project Pegasus restructuring. The reason given was a need to attract younger talent who’d rather live in a big city.
It was unfair, but what truly broke my heart was the insult. Those replaced were only in their 30s and 40s and had guided these brands through years of reinvention, restructures and a pandemic. Now they were being discarded in a city that cost far less to operate in, in favor of people who hadn’t weathered those storms.
Boston produces experienced, educated professionals; it has the resources to do it. El Paso has far less, yet these talented, hard-working people existed here anyway. This is what’s lost on outsiders. Our talent matters more because it wasn’t handed to us on a silver platter.
I was one of a few offered relocation, but a 20% raise doesn’t go far in the Boston area for a single mom with two kids and a dog.
Almost all my colleagues were laid off. Many have struggled to find anything close to the positions they once held. One of the hardest workers I’ve ever known spent two years job hunting before landing in food service. That’s not a dig at food service but an indictment of a city with too few places for people like her.
Is it a coincidence that once Helen of Troy chose to leave El Paso behind, its trajectory took a nosedive? Its stock has fallen a staggering 87% in five years, with three permanent CEOs in three years.
Now Empower Brands, owned by Spectrum Brands and Oaktree Capital, has offered $37 a share, which Helen of Troy’s board has rejected. Another offer seems likely, and if the company sells, chances of its headquarters remaining here are doubtful.
El Paso keeps being told we don’t have enough talent, enough polish, enough reason to stay. We’re good enough for distribution centers, call centers, chain restaurants and discount outlets but rarely for headquarters, leadership or the work that shapes a company’s future. Too often the big names that do arrive take more from us than they give back, and we thank them for deigning to think of us.
The onus isn’t entirely on outsiders, though. There’s an old saying that you teach people how to treat you, and El Paso has been teaching the world to underestimate it for a long time.
From Circle K to El Paso Corp. to Western Playland to Western Refining, we have a habit of growing companies and watching them leave. We let good things drift away and then act surprised that nobody fights for us.
Helen of Troy is yet another cautionary tale of what happens when a company decides El Paso is the help, not the brains. We need to make sure local employers, homegrown or not, know what they have, but first, we need to know it ourselves.
Denise Heard-Bashur is an El Paso native, former Helen of Troy creative studio manager and independent marketing consultant who writes the Substack “My So-Called Midlife Crisis.”
The post Opinion: El Paso lets employers undervalue our talent. That must change. appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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