Manager, Merchandise Creative Design

Manager, Merchandise Creative Design

Reporting to the Senior Director of Merchandise, the Manager, Merchandise Creative Design leads the creative execution of all merchandise-related design work while overseeing project intake, resource allocation, work prioritization, and on-time delivery. This role combines hands-on design leadership with team coordination, workflow governance, and cross-functional stakeholder communication to ensure efficient execution. The Manager is responsible for project sequencing, maintaining production handoff quality, and ensuring creative output meets brand standards and production requirements.

Through strong operational oversight and personal design contribution, this position delivers high-quality creative solutions that support organizational priorities and production timelines without disruption.

This position is a full-time, on-site role in Augusta, GA.

• Design and develop merchandise graphics, artwork, and visual concepts across product categories, maintaining alignment with brand standards, tournament objectives, business priorities, and production requirements.
• Provide campus-wide creative support for design collateral, template creation, logo and brand design/development, resource materials, and other visual assets that support organizational priorities and maintain brand consistency.
• Lead art-to-product execution from initial concept through production-ready file delivery, serving as a hands-on designer on high-impact and high-visibility merchandise initiatives.
• Create original designs and execute revisions based on stakeholder feedback, supplier requirements, material constraints, decoration methods, scale, and final product application.
• Own and operate the creative intake process using Wrike as the central resource for request intake, prioritization, status tracking, and reporting, ensuring all merchandise creative requests are evaluated for completeness, feasibility, priority fit, and strategic alignment.
• Exercise decision-making authority to advance, return, defer, or deny creative requests based on brief readiness, team capacity, business priorities, and production timeline impact.
• Maintain a clear, current, and prioritized project queue tied to merchandise deadlines, tournament calendars, campaign needs, supplier schedules, and organizational objectives, re-sequencing work as needed to protect critical deadlines, reduce delivery risk, and support production commitments.
• Assign and distribute creative work across internal designers and external partners based on skillset, project requirements, available capacity, workload balance, complexity, and business need.
• Lead workflow reviews to monitor project progress, surface blockers early, resolve issues, and keep creative work moving across internal teams, external partners, and supplier timelines.
• Serve as the central coordination point between Creative Services, Product Development, Merchandise leadership, Brand and Marketing, and external partners to align creative concepts, product requirements, business needs, brand standards, project timelines, priority shifts, delivery risks, decision needs, and handoff expectations.
• Partner with Product Development teams and suppliers to validate artwork feasibility, material compatibility, decoration techniques, technical specifications, and production constraints early in the development process.
• Coordinate artwork delivery schedules, revision cycles, approval workflows, and production handoffs to support supplier timelines, manufacturing deadlines, and on-time product execution.
• Own final review and quality control for creative assets, ensuring file readiness, technical accuracy, brand integrity, production compliance, and execution quality before handoff.
• Design, implement, and refine creative workflows, accountability standards, review processes, and performance measures to improve speed, consistency, output quality, and reduce rework.
• Support creative direction, visual strategy, licensing initiatives, brand campaigns, special projects, and cross-functional planning sessions by representing Merchandise Creative priorities, timelines, capacity, and…