Purpose & Overall Relevance for the Organization:
Manage the respective Footwear Creation Hub responsibilities, ensuring successful product development, owning calendar and project planning to deliver against the stated seasonal objectives and longer term aspirations for the SPEED team, focused mainly on key-accounts SMU requests, as well as off-calendar Late-Add Projects for the Lifestyle Footwear BU.
Key Responsibilities:
- Work closely with the Product Creation and Sourcing Partners to build strategies to achieve development excellence, and industry leading processes that guarantee great product delivered on time.
- Develop new products & concepts that exceed consumer expectations, while hitting target costing.
- Help create industry leading speed & service model to enable the adidas brand to get closer to market needs.
- Identify business opportunities and risks, initiating key action steps with relevant BU functions and cross-functional partners.
- Take decisions that enable progress, challenge the status-quo to deliver results.
- Create a powerful team spirit with a passion towards exceeding short, mid and long term goals and objectives.
- Present Range both internally & externally (HQ, Ops / Sourcing / T1)
- Ensure maintenance and enhancement of product information systems.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:
- Proven management skills, including ability to bring together cross-functional partners and resources, both internal and external
- Experience in interpreting design intent, offering alternative solutions, and guiding decisions by providing technical resources.
- Proficient working with factory vendors to ensure and improve manufacturability.
- Highly organized and resilient, with a high tolerance for ambiguity, and outstanding ability to seamlessly balance constantly evolving priorities.
- Ability to participate in overlapping seasonal projects with competing resources and deadlines
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a keen awareness of the audience.
- Understanding of when to dive deep into the technical details and when to simplify the complexity.
- Unique blend of marketing, development and sourcing experience to suit the Sportswear FTW business model, with ideally some clear exposure and understanding of the Design functions.
- Ability to work with all levels of the organization
- Comprehensive understanding of consumer markets, specifically in the sporting goods industry
- Understanding of various channel distributions, net sales, margins, profit and inventory
- Prior knowledge of taking product from conception through implementation preferred
- Knowledge of footwear in construction/development strongly preferred
- Exposure to Special Make-Ups process preferred
- Good numerical skills with the ability to negotiate
- Skill in MS Office applications (Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Smartsheet)
- Ability to travel, domestic and international.
- Ability to be agile and adaptive to new ways of working, overlapping calendars, and changing of goal posts
Requisite Education and Experience / Minimum Qualifications:
- Four year college or university degree, preferably in Marketing/Business
- Minimum five (5) years related experience
- Equivalent education and/or experience may be substituted for degree
- Experience in Footwear Marketing and or development