MindWare Senior Manager Product & Brand

Overview

As our Senior Manager Product & Brand
, you will be responsible for providing strategic leadership across Product Development, Creative/Art Direction, Brand & Innovation, Catalog, and E‑Commerce Merchandising for the Specialty Division, Mind Ware. This role ensures alignment between product strategy, creative execution, merchandising, and brand expression to drive growth, differentiation, and customer relevance across all customer touchpoints. You will act as the primary point of contact for cross-functional partners in the absence of the SVP, Specialty Division, and focus on establishing priorities, enabling leaders, and ensuring cohesive execution across teams while driving integrated planning and performance across product, print, and digital channels.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

• Establishes and communicates a unified vision across Product Development, Creative, and Brand/Design to ensure cohesive execution and strong market impact.
• Aligns product innovation, visual storytelling, and brand standards to support Mind Ware growth objectives.
• Translates business goals into clear strategic priorities for functional leaders and their teams.
• Identifies opportunities to streamline workflows, eliminate redundancies, and improve cross‑functional collaboration.
• Provides strategic direction to Product Development leadership to guide portfolio priorities, innovation focus, and execution against business objectives.
• Reviews and guides major product concepts, innovation initiatives, and portfolio direction.
• Partners with Product Development leadership on long‑range planning, innovation roadmaps, and investment priorities to ensure product pipelines align with brand positioning, customer needs, margin targets, and growth strategies.
• Ensures cross‑functional alignment between Product Development, Merchandising, Creative, and Wholesale.
• Provides strategic oversight to the Senior Product Developer & Catalog Manager to ensure catalog product assortments, merchandising strategies, and creative direction aligning with brand positioning and business objectives.
• Ensures strong integration between catalog merchandising, product development, and creative teams to deliver compelling assortments, storytelling, and visual presentation across print and digital channels.
• Guides long‑range catalog and product assortment planning to support innovation, exclusivity, and customer relevance within the direct‑to‑consumer business.
• Oversees Creative leadership to ensure all creative output aligns with brand standards, strategic objectives, and customer expectations.
• Guides the evolution of creative strategy across channels while preserving brand consistency.
• Serves as an escalation point for major creative decisions, prioritization, and resource planning.
• Champions high‑quality creative execution while balancing speed, efficiency, and scalability.
• Acts as a brand steward, ensuring consistency and clarity of brand expression across product, packaging, marketing, and customer touchpoints.
• Drives collaboration between Product, Creative, and Marketing to strengthen storytelling and differentiation.
• Encourages innovation, experimentation, and customer‑centric thinking across teams.
• Ensures brand standards and design principles are clearly defined, communicated, and upheld.
• Provides strategic oversight and direction to E‑Commerce Merchandising leadership to ensure online merchandising strategies align with product, creative, and brand priorities across channels.
• Ensures alignment between e‑commerce merchandising, product launches, and creative execution to deliver a cohesive customer experience across digital and direct‑to‑consumer channels.
• Partners with E‑Commerce Merchandising leadership to ensure insights from site performance, customer behavior, and testing inform broader product, creative, and merchandising strategies.
• Establishes goals and performance expectations aligned with division and company objectives.
• Supports talent development, succession planning, and capability building across functions.
• Fosters a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Acts as point…