Description:
At Bestway USA, our passions and innovations come to life thanks to the people who work here. We value diversity and believe that different backgrounds, ideas, and perspectives help us spread happiness and create a culture of positivity. We embrace flexibility and many of our positions offer a hybrid work-from-home schedule. Bestway USA was selected as one of the top companies to work for in Arizona for 3 consecutive years, most recently in 2023! We generously start all employees with at least 20 days of paid time off annually and 11 paid holidays. We are a hard-working, casual, dog-friendly company (yes, your polite and playful pup is always welcome at our office!). We invest in our employees' - and their families - health; we believe this is part of your total compensation, so we strive to keep employee costs low and contribute thousands each year to every plan's premium. Our Core Values of Respect, Recognition, Accountability, Leadership, and Communication guide our decision making, how we engage with others, and how we lead our teams.
The Category Manager is responsible for product planning and execution throughout the product lifecycle; including analyzing market and customer needs, defining the strategic vision by category, working closely with overseas research and development, internal design, sales, creative services, and support to ensure project and organizational goals are met.
Essential Functions: Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
- Implement and execute product development strategy for given categories by analyzing sales data, market information, customer needs, and design trends in key global markets
- Define product design direction and coordinate execution through working directly with product and industrial design teams
- Support sales with the development of customer exclusive items for key retailers in priority product categories
- Coordinate with graphic designers and marketing for the creation of packaging, catalogs, and other supplemental assets for given categories
- Coordinate with Shanghai R&D for the development of product samples, prototypes, and product testing
- Create and maintain sales tools to represent and express product benefits to sales team members and retail buyers
- Handle the licensing product approval process for all new and existing licenses for given categories
- Maintain documentation regarding project tracking and development status
- Conduct market research activities to improve understanding of consumer behavior, needs, and pain points. Activities including but not limited to: consumer studies, surveys, or focus groups.
- Handle administrative tasks such as sample purchasing, parcel shipping, expense reporting, and so forth
Requirements:
Competencies:
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to influence cross-functional teams without formal authority
- Self-motivated to identify trends and improvement opportunities for given product categories
- Strong project management skills with ability to plan tasks, manage progress, and resolve conflict across multiple projects concurrently
- Exceptional attention to detail
- An eye for design, ability to recognize color and design trends
- Comfortable with international travel, especially to China
- Curiosity, flexibility, positivity, and a good sense of humor
- Direct experience working within a product development team in the consumer goods industry
- Experience working with licensors
Required Education and Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in a related business or design field
- Minimum of 3 years of experience in a product development role, 5 years of experience is preferred
- Experience working directly with manufacturing operations overseas
- Microsoft Office Suite, especially Excel and PowerPoint with intermediate to advanced knowledge
Travel: Some travel required, including international
Bestway (USA) Inc. is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions at Bestway will be based on merit, qualifications, and abilities. We do not discriminate upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
