Product Development and Merchandising Manager

Luminous Optical Company is a Grand Rapids-based eyewear company developing and growing a portfolio of products across optical eyewear, sunglasses, readers, POP/displays, and emerging categories. We serve consumers, independent optical practices, and major retail partners across direct-to-consumer, business-to-business, and retail channels.

We are entering an exciting period of growth, with more products, retail programs, and cross-functional initiatives moving at the same time. As our portfolio grows, we are building the systems and team needed to move quickly while maintaining strong visibility, accountability, and discipline throughout product development.

We are looking for a highly organized, analytical Product Development & Merchandising Manager to own the processes, information, and project management behind our growing product portfolio, encompassing both frame developments and POP/display solutions. This role sits at the intersection of product development, merchandising, sales, account management, supply chain, finance, manufacturing, leadership, and product marketing.

At its core, this role will own the process and the information while helping influence product decisions. You will create visibility and accountability across the product development pipeline, manage timelines and deliverables, organize critical product information, analyze product and assortment performance, and ensure the right stakeholders are involved at the right points in the process.

This is not primarily a product design role. We are looking for an exceptional project manager who is comfortable with data, creates structure, follows through, and can turn cross-functional input into clear next steps. Product Marketing will own product positioning, messaging, launch strategy, and go-to-market execution; this role will own the product development process, product information, merchandising analysis, and product launch readiness.

• Project Management: Own and maintain the master product development calendar, roadmap, and project trackers across frames, POP/displays, brands, categories, collections, and customer-specific programs.
• Project Execution: Manage multiple product initiatives—covering frames as well as POP/display development—from initial concept through sampling, revisions, costing, approvals, production readiness, and launch readiness, with clear milestones, owners, dependencies, and deadlines.
• Visibility & Accountability: Maintain clear visibility into where every active product initiative stands; proactively identify blockers, missed deadlines, unanswered questions, and decisions needed to keep work moving.
• Product Information: Maintain a reliable source of truth for product specifications, samples, revisions, approvals, costing, pricing inputs, MOQs, timelines, and other key development information.
• Data & Merchandising Analysis: Analyze product performance across brands, collections, SKUs, customers, channels, price points, and other relevant dimensions to identify trends, opportunities, and potential issues.
• Assortment Planning: Maintain seasonal and ongoing line plans and assortment information, using sales performance, inventory, customer feedback, margin considerations, and business priorities to support planning.
• Recommendations: Translate data and cross-functional input into clear recommendations around SKU additions, extensions, replenishment, refreshes, discontinuations, and future development priorities.
• Cross-Functional Decision Support: Bring together input from Sales, Account Management, Finance, Supply Chain, Product Marketing, and Leadership; clarify decisions, document outcomes, and translate decisions into executable next steps.
• Manufacturer & Vendor…