Opportunity Overview:
Efficient operations is core to our success at Apply, and fulfillment is at the heart of it. Excellence therein drives customer satisfaction; boosts order velocity; and increases our speed & quality of our decision making.
We’re seeking a full-time Operations Manager to help lead our fulfillment & product operations at our HQ in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
You’ll manage a team of 6 part-time Fulfillment Associates, facilitating inbound & outbound logistics; identifying & escalating risks; prioritizing our work; and troubleshooting when necessary. You’ll ensure that our fulfillment team is properly staffed & trained, set a high performance culture, supported by clear metrics and efficient workflows.
You’ll balance these ongoing tasks with long-term projects that impact our whole business. Where process already exists, you’ll seek to refine it. Where it doesn’t, you’ll work to define it — with a bias towards software-driven solutions.
Specific Responsibilities:
- Manage Full Product Operations Lifecycle: via team of Fulfillment Associates including:
1. Oversee Receiving & Quality Assurance: take in parcels from suppliers; examine & document the state of each; determine conformity to quality guidelines; share conclusions with broader ops & product teams.
2. Coordinate Product Assembly: manage the assembly of sticker components into finished products by fulfillment team.
3. Orchestrate Fulfillment: oversee pick, pack, ship, and track for direct-to-consumer, wholesale, and B2B parcels.
4. Manage Shipping Carriers: ensure we’re getting the highest quality service at the most competitive prices
5. Lead Inventory Management: keep track of product components, factoring in daily fluctuations resulting from inbound parcels, outbound orders, defective product, etc, partnering with the Product Team to replenish, as necessary. Enter, manage, and reconcile inventory data for the Apply product team.
6. Data Hygiene: ensure all product operations are accurately reflected in Airtable (our source of truth); spot discrepancies & deficiencies; create dashboards & operational workflows as necessary to address them.
- Vendor Compliance: review routing guides, understand core customer requirements; complete requisite onboarding materials; communicate needs & potential deficiencies across relevant stakeholders.
- Process Improvement: routinely identify bottlenecks & risks in our workflow and propose solutions for refining our fulfillment & product operations using a combination of off-the-shelf software & bespoke agentic workflows. Maintain SOPs & document changes to enable the broader organization to level-up.
- Elevate Office Organization & Environment: ensure that products, parcels, packaging, and fulfillment supplies are highly-organized with attention to process and spatial dynamics, enabling our space to reflect the tasteful, positive, and creative brand we’re building.
- Triage Incidents with Care: work with Apply partners, customers, and team to understand where parcels may have gone awry; resolve briskly & fairly; document learnings; and update relevant teammates along the way.
Qualifications:
- Enthusiasm: interest in physical consumer products & delivering an exceptional consumer & partner experiences.
- Curiosity: joyfully learns independently; eager to understand the “whys” & “hows”; comfortable expressing when things aren’t clear; committed to helping us arrive at the best answer, with proper urgency.
- Organized: adept at keeping track of multiple work streams across team. Great at managing a physical space with high volumes of inventory & packaging parcels with precision.
- Attention to detail: anticipates gaps or compliance risks in operational processes before things get off-track; spots a product defect form a mile a way.
- Clear proactive communicator: concisely provides context on issues; explains potential solutions; and thoughtfully leaves notes for teammates — comfortably in a hybrid working environment (i.e. both IRL & via Slack).
- Demonstrable good judgment: able to weigh & clearly convey costs & benefits of key decisions, advocate for what’s best; and have track-record of making right call.
- Data-Native: you get excited by spreadsheets & databases, eager to unlock the value that lies within, through analysis, building workflows, and systems thinking.
- Metrics-oriented: understands what drives success & failure; identifies metrics as leading indicators; builds culture of fluency & progress accordingly.
- Demonstrable acumen with AI: uses AI not just for research, but to build workflows, run analysis, and create artifacts (ex: presentations, spreadsheets, documents, mini apps).
- Inventory management or fulfillment experience: through Shopify, Airtable, or another comparable system.
- Ability to work in-office 5 days a week: excited to be in our Dumbo studio / fulfillment center (M-F, 9am-5pm).
About Us
Apply is a fast-growing New York City-based sticker brand, driven to give more people a chance to make things they’re proud of; personalize their everyday objects; and engage with art & culture.
We make the best stickers & patches on Earth, designed in- house & in collaboration with iconic artists (ex: Warhol); musicians (ex: The Beatles); and characters (ex: Snoopy). You’ll find our products in world-class cultural institutions (ex: MoMA); bookstores (ex: The Strand); outdoors stores (ex: REI); art supplies stores (ex: Blick); airport retailers (ex: WHSmith); amongst hundreds of others. On the Faire wholesale marketplace, we have a 5-star rating across 99 reviews.
Our team is a tight hybrid group of dozen people, backed by some of the most creative people in business. People like Scott Belsky (Chief Strategy Officer at Adobe), Jen Rubio (Founder of Away), Michael Lynton (Chairman of Snap); Lucy Deland (COO of PaperlessPost); and Jonathan Klein (Founder of Getty Images).
