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, MindWare. 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.

Detailed Description

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

Essential Functions

• 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 MindWare 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 of contact and decision-maker in the absence of the SVP, Specialty Division, representing the Specialty Division in high-level planning, prioritization, and issue resolution.

• Communicates status, risks, and opportunities to executive leadership with clarity and confidence.

• Maintains regular, predictable attendance.

• Abides by all policies and procedures of MindWare and Oriental Trading Company.

Marginal Functions

• Supports interdepartmental projects as they pertain to this area

• Maintains industry knowledge and new practices as it relates to on-line merchandising and product page content

• Performs other duties as assigned

Here’s what you need to join the fun:

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Working understanding of site analytic tools and metrics

• Detail oriented

• Excellent communications skills

• Ability to think conceptually

• Ability work under pressure of deadlines and multi-task

• Knowledge of HTML and A/B testing environments helpful

• Ability to perform job duties in a safe manner

Education

• Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, Merchandising, related field or equivalent combination of education and experience

Experience

• Minimum seven years experience with site management including workflow in an on-line retail environment

• Minimum three years previous management experience

• Previous experience with content management systems, catalog and ecommerce business

What’s in it for you:

• Comprehensive wellness and employee assistance programs

• Medical, dental, vision coverage options

• Company 401K matching program

• Basic life insurance

• Parental leave

• Medical and family leave

• Paid Time Off

• Employee discount

• Company events and more!

For Minnesota, we expect the base pay for this role to fall between $120,000–$160,000 annually, depending on experience and qualifications. The wage range provided represents MindWare’s good faith estimate of possible compensation at the time of posting. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience and other factors permitted by law.

Join us at MindWare, part of the Oriental Trading family of brands, where fun means business!

MindWare (www.mindware.com) is the award-winning creator, manufacturer and distributor of Brainy Toys for Kids of All Ages. Founded in 1990, the company started out as a small retail store in Minneapolis, later evolving into a catalog, website and wholesale business that delivers toys and games to customers' doorsteps, classrooms, neighborhood toy stores and the world's largest retailers. In 2012, MindWare was purchased by Oriental Trading Company, the nation's largest direct retailer of value-priced party supplies, arts and crafts, school supplies, toys and novelties. With a corporate vision to “Make Life More Fun,” Oriental Trading (a Berkshire Hathaway company) spreads joy and smiles to millions each year through a robust family of brands; Oriental Trading, Fun Express, MindWare, SmileMakers, Morris Costumes and halloweenexpress.com.

EOE