Former Brandy Melville Employee Describes Her Experience as 'Miserable' and 'Insane' (Exclusive)

Delaney Rinke, 22, tells PEOPLE that she was scouted to work at the controversial clothing retailer when she was just 14 years old

On the heels of the new HBO documentary Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion, more and more former employees are taking to social media to share stories about the controversial fast fashion retailer. In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, 22-year-old Delaney Rinke speaks out about her own “miserable” experience.

Rinke says she was just 14 years old when she was scouted by an employee while shopping at Brandy Melville, which opened in Los Angeles in 2009 and quickly became popular with teen girls.

“They had asked to take a picture of my outfit and then asked if I was interested in a job,” she recalls. “My mom was shopping around at the time, so she didn't see them take a picture, but she didn't think much of it.”

Soon after, Rinke started working at a Brandy Melville in Orange County, California, where she was employed for four years.

“I was really, really young, so I was quite miserable at work,” she tells PEOPLE.

Rinke says that each day, workers were required to take photos of their outfits — a practice that, in hindsight, she thinks “was insane.”

Related: Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion Will Shock You: All the Biggest Bombshells from the New Documentary

“They'd be like, ‘Okay, cool, everybody, let's get outside,’” she recalls. “We would line up and wait to take turns taking pictures of our outfits. They would take three photos of every outfit. They would take full-body pictures. Then they would take a close-up of your top and your bottom, and then they would take a close-up of your shoes.”

”Photos had to be very staged and make us look a lot older than we were, which was insane,” Rinke added.

Representatives for Brandy Melville have not responded to PEOPLE's multiple requests for comment about both the claims in the documentary and from former staffers on social media.

On TikTok, where the 22-year-old has gone viral for sharing her experience working at Brandy Melville, Rinke said that in her early employment, she had no idea who the outfit photos were being sent to.

“They send it to God knows who. They’re not telling you who,” she shared in a video that has amassed over 768,000 views.

“Later when I was in management, I found out those pictures were going to corporate,” Rinke continued. “Essentially, the owner of the whole store was giving people strikes of their outfits or [deciding] if they looked pretty enough to work there. When people got to three outfits [strikes] that upper management did not like, their time was done.”

Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion, which premiered on April 9 and was directed by Academy Award winner Eva Orner, sheds light on the retailer’s infamous photo-taking ritual.

According to accounts from several former staffers in the documentary, Brandy Melville's Italian founder, Silvio Marsan, along with his son and company cofounder Stephan, allegedly required employees to send "store style" photos of their outfits.

Workers were allegedly told that the photos would be used as a way to audition for modeling opportunities at the brand. Additionally, Stephen, who also ran the brand’s Instagram account, initially took full-body photos but began requesting chest and feet pictures, according to a former store employee who was interviewed in the documentary.

Stephan Marsan did not respond to the filmmakers request for an interview or PEOPLE's request for comment on the allegations in the documentary.

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Controversies about Brandy Melville became widely known when Kate Taylor, an investigative journalist at Business Insider , wrote an article exposing alleged discrimination and employee exploitation at the brand in September 2021.

At the time the Business Insider article was published, Brandy Melville representatives, attorneys, and other executives named in the article did not respond to Insider's requests for comment.

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