A Sephora employee describes the devastating moment she and others in her district were suddenly fired via a conference call

Shoshy Ciment/Business Insider

Sephora laid off thousands of store workers.

• Sephora fired thousands of employees across the US on Tuesday.
• The company's president and CEO Jean-André Rougeot said in a statement that the impacted employees include those who have been with the company for a short tenure and worked limited hours.
• At least some employees were notified of the layoffs via conference calls.
• "You could hear everyone absolutely sobbing," Brittney Coorpender, a former skincare advisor in a California Sephora store, who was included in the layoffs, said of what it was like after the call was finished.
• Sephora did not immediately return Business Insider's request for additional comment.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

After closing all of its US stores last month, Sephora laid off thousands of employees across the US who have been with the company for a short tenure and worked limited hours, the company announced in a Tuesday statement on its website.

Sephora employed over 17,000 US store employees, according to its website. In a statement on the company's website, Sephora president and CEO Jean-André Rougeot said that more than 9,000 store employees in the US remain employed and that they will be paid based on average hours worked. They will also receive existing health benefits through late May or until stores re-open.

"In the US, we have made the difficult decision to let go a portion of our part-time and seasonal store employee base," Rougeot said in the statement, later adding, "We believe these actions taken together will support the long-term health of our business, protect our people and preserve our ability to reopen our stores when that time comes."

Brittney Coorpender, a former skincare advisor in a California Sephora store who was laid off, described the moment she heard she and thousands of other employees were fired.

Coorpender, who had worked with the company for a year and half, said that she was notified that there would be a conference call on Tuesday afternoon for some employees in her district, conducted by her district manager, less than an hour after she had completed a check-in call with her manager regarding her job performance. She said she was told about the conference call about 10 minutes in advance.

Coorpender said she and her fellow employees were asked to mute themselves on the call and were then informed that they were being fired, effective immediately, and that they might be able to reapply in the future.

"You could hear everyone absolutely sobbing," Coorpender said about what it was like after the call was finished. "I hung up as soon as I heard the first person cry at the end I couldn't take it. I was in tears myself."

Coorpender posted about her experience on Twitter, where her tweet garnered over 7,000 likes in about 24 hours.

Rougeot announced in an email to shoppers on March 16 that the company would close all of its stores in the US and Canada through April 3. At the time Rougeot wrote that all employees would "continue to receive their base pay for scheduled shifts."

"Our managers were just as blindsided as we were," Coorpender said of the layoffs.

Sephora did not immediately return Business Insider's request for additional comment.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (646) 376-6018 using a non-work phone, email at sciment@businessinsider.com, or Twitter DM at @shoshanaciment.

Do you have a personal experience with the coronavirus you'd like to share? Or a tip on how your town or community is handling the pandemic? Please email covidtips@businessinsider.com and tell us your story.

And get the latest coronavirus analysis and research from Business Insider Intelligence on how COVID-19 is impacting businesses.

Sephora ruined our lives. Lol. Point blank period. Great conference call guys! Thanks for hanging up and not letting anyone speak. Thanks for breaking all our hearts. But "beauty stands together" right?

- Britt (@brittcoorpender) March 31, 2020

NOW WATCH: We tested a machine that brews beer at the push of a button