Digital Merchandising Manager

The Freeman Company is a global leader in events, on a mission to redefine live for a new era. With a data-driven approach and the industry’s largest network of experts, The Freeman Company’s insights shape exhibitions, exhibits, and events that drive audiences to action. The integrated full-service solutions leverage a 99-year legacy in event management as well as new technologies to deliver moments that matter.

We're looking for a data-driven, detail-oriented Digital Merchandising Manager to own the end-to-end merchandising experience across our e-commerce site. In this role, you'll shape how customers discover and shop our products — from homepage curation and category structure to search, filtering, and recommendation logic — while driving measurable improvements in conversion, engagement, average order value, and overall site performance.

You'll build and execute merchandising strategies for key selling moments (launches, promotions, other campaigns), continuously test and refine layout, badging, and placement strategies, and use performance data to make both real-time adjustments and long-term planning decisions. This role sits at the intersection of merchandising, analytics, and cross-functional collaboration — you'll partner closely with Digital Product, UX, Marketing, and Creative teams to ensure a cohesive, on-brand shopping journey, and you'll regularly present performance insights and strategic recommendations to leadership.

This position will support our Commerce group under our Technology Services team. It is eligible to work a hybrid schedule, generally requiring work in-office and/or show site 2-3 days per week. The ideal candidate will be based out of any of the following locations:

• Chicago, IL
• Las Vegas, NV
• Owns the day-to-day merchandising of the e-commerce site, including product placement, category organization, homepage curation, and search/navigation optimization — accountable for the resulting conversion rate, AOV, and sell-through outcomes.
• Develops and executes merchandising strategies for key selling periods (new launches, promotions, other) with accountability for executing against targets.
• Owns analysis of site performance data (conversion rate, click-through, bounce rate, sell-through) to identify opportunities and adjust merchandising in real time and via long term capability planning.
• Owns the site search, filtering, and recommendation logic strategy — accountable for product discoverability performance and for evaluating, selecting, and managing on-site search/merchandising platforms (e.g., Algolia, Luminate).
• Owns the A/B testing roadmap and governance: defines hypotheses, prioritizes the test backlog, and owns reporting of results and resulting merchandising decisions
• Owns product content standards (imagery, copy, attributes, metadata) — sets quality guidelines and is accountable for auditing and enforcing them across all product pages.
• Owns the merchandising performance narrative to leadership: prepares and delivers recaps, risk call-outs, and investment recommendations directly to senior stakeholders.
• Leads prioritization and direction-setting for a cross-functional working group (Digital Product, UX, Marketing, Creative) to execute the merchandising roadmap — sets the agenda and priorities this group works against.
• Monitors competitive and industry trends and is accountable for translating them into concrete merchandising strategy changes.
• Collaborates with digital product and UX teams to design frictionless discovery and buying journeys.
• Collaborates with Marketing to ensure digital merchandising supports campaign calendars and promotional pushes.
• Supports IT/Engineering on technical implementation of merchandising and search tooling as needed.