Inventory, Operations & Logistics Manager for American E-commerce Outdoor Sporting Goods Company

Serious applicants only. Please answer the questions below, otherwise your application will not be considered. We're looking for someone to work with us for the next 5-10 years, so please spend some time in reading the JD below.

We're a rapidly growing outdoor sporting goods and clothing company. We design, manufacture, market and sell our own brands on Upgrade to see actual info. We are a market leader in many product categories such as sleeping bags, cots, ski gloves, ski goggles, running gloves, stand up paddles, surfing accessories, headwear and more. We've been in business for 9 years now.

Our Company Mission: making the outdoors accessible to all through reasonably priced, high quality outdoor Upgrade to see actual infopany values:
- Ownership: owning projects from start to finish & ensuring high-quality, accurate deliverables
- Accountability: doing what you said you’ll Upgrade to see actual infot over-promising and under-delivering.
- Proactivity: (1) identifying problems/issues as early as possible and (2) solving them independently or suggesting solutions first

As our Inventory, Operations & Logistics Manager, here are several ongoing projects you will work on:

Just in Time Inventory Management:
- Staying in stock: we must ensure we stay in stock (we have 1000 SKUs, though probably only 50 that are important) through this Q4 at Amazon. This ordinarily wouldn’t be challenging, but with the 3 constraints listed below, it will be challenging this holiday season.
- Minimizing storage fees: Amazon and our 3PLs charge us for monthly storage. Amazon charges on a monthly per unit volume basis, with a higher fee in Q4, while our 3PLs charge us on a monthly per-pallet basis. We’d like to minimize storage fees, which often times means keeping more inventory at our 3PLs than Amazon. However, we must balance this with inbound transportation costs to Amazon — think LTL, FTL or UPS Ground — and also inventory receiving times at Amazon. (For more on Amazon storage fees, please see Upgrade to see actual info)
- Minimizing Amazon long-term storage fees: Amazon fines us monthly for all units that have been at Amazon for over 12 months based on their volume (see Upgrade to see actual info)
- FYI we use OrderHive as an inventory management system across our suppliers, Amazon and our 3PLs. We also use Upgrade to see actual info and Sellerboard for sales analytics and inventory Upgrade to see actual infoventory Planning:
- Ensuring we have at least 3-6 months of stock of our inventory between Amazon and our 3PLs
- Analyzing our weekly movers and shakers (top growers/decliners) to detect shifts in COVID-related demand. COVID has changed consumer purchasing behaviors, so as we go into our first winter with COVID, we must be on the lookout for products that increase or decrease drastically Y/Y in sales. For those products that increase, we’ll see if we can place a reorder to restock. For those that dramatically decrease, we know we must start discounting very early in the season to move through all our inventory.
- Ordering: how much do we need to order to have cover for the next 6 months? When should we place these orders? We work with 20 suppliers in different areas of China

Operations:
- Coordinating 100+ shipments from China to the US: deciding where each of these shipments go (Amazon or 3PL) and deciding whether we air or ocean freight the goods. We use a data-driven approach to determine ocean vs air and Amazon vs 3PL.
- Cost optimization with forwarders: ensuring that we get the best ocean or air freight rates
- Customs, duties and entry: ensuring our products are declared under the proper HTS tariff codes and exchanging the right documents with our factories and forwarders.
- Creating inbound shipments into Amazon: you’ll have to enter packing lists into Amazon, book LTL/FTL pickups through Amazon SellerCentral or Amazon Freight.
- Creating inbounds into our 3PLs: you must coordinate pickups and deliveries with our 3PL
- Note: we are pretty much a 100?A (Fulfilled by Amazon) seller, which means Amazon fulfills all our inventory. We have a 3rd party vendor who can fulfill products for us (it’s called FBM, or fulfilled by merchant), but they’re more expensive, ship slower, and don’t come with the Amazon Prime badge.

Constraints: We are now operating on Amazon with three major constraints:
- ASIN-level inventory limitations: for now, think of an ASIN as a SKU. Typically, we can send an unlimited amount of inventory to Amazon. However, Amazon is limiting the amount of inventory we can restock for each ASIN based on the past 30-90 days of sales. This is extremely problematic for some of our winter seasonal products (i.e. ski gloves), which barely have any sales in the past 3 months. We’ve ordered tens of thousands of units, but they’re only allowing us to inbound 200 units at a time. Once we start selling those units, we can inbound more into Amazon.
- Account-level inventory limitations: for the first time going into Q4, we have an account level inventory limit as well. This means that we have a limited amount of volume-based storage for Standard, Oversize and Apparel products (this is Amazon’s weird classification structure).
- Inventory receiving times at Amazon: because Amazon’s fulfillment centers are so overloaded now, it’s taking 1-2 weeks for inventory to be received. This is a major problem for seasonal items. Often times, sales for winter products will surge when the weather gets cold, meaning sales will jump from 5 units per day to 50 units per day very quickly. We will try to replenish the inventory ASAP, but if it takes 14 days for Amazon to receive inventory, we will be out of stock for a few days.
- Why is Amazon doing this? They’re doing this to alleviate the pressure on their fulfillment centers. E-commerce has leapt from 18% to 28% share of US Retail, and Amazon cannot keep up with COVID demand.

Other Projects: there's plenty of room to grow and learn at this company (only after you've mastered everything above):
- Building a marketing calendar based on product seasonality and overstock: based on our inventory levels and historical seasonality, we can promote products through deal sites like Upgrade to see actual info
- Communicating issues with the Sales & Marketing & Creative teams to solve issues. Example: based on the competition, here are a few ideas on how we can improve conversion rates on this product
- Manage profitability across our product lines -- make data-driven decisions on product line expansions and sunsetting (ending) of unsuccessful products

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Your Experience at the Company:
* You will work very closely with the CEO of the company, a Stanford grad and former Googler
* You must be okay with morning or late evening calls to talk with the team in the Philippines, our teammates in the UK and US East Coast and our forwarders and 3PLs on the the US West Coast
* You will meet with your teammates 4 times per year in Manila (to be resumed post-pandemic). Here's our company structure: 15 in PH, 3 in the US (including CEO), 2 in China, 2 in the UK
* Creative team (5): graphic design, product/packaging design, photo shoots, video shoot speccing
* Sales & Marketing (5): listing optimization, keyword research, PPC advertising, display advertising, copywriting, SEO partnerships
* Branding & Marketing (1): high-level branding, guidance on product listings
* Customer Happiness (3): customer support, handwritten letters to customers
* Development (2): automating processes, scraping data, providing data-driven insights
* Business Analyst (1): sales analysis, inventory management
* China team (2): sourcing, manufacturing, quality control, vendor management, logistics


Traits necessary for this role:
- Extremely analytical, data-driven and quantitive, strong in Excel
- Insanely attentive to detail
- Organized
- Operations experience a multi-million dollar revenue business
- Understands the bigger picture
- Motivated, curious, eager to learn and take on more responsibility
- Willing and able to get your hands dirty
- Hard working: Must be willing and able to work up to 60 hours per week occasionally
- Nice to have: knowledge of Agile/Scrum and Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) as those are the systems we use

Benefits:
* Employer-reimbursed health insurance
* 21 days paid time off
* Remote work, no commute: work from the comfort of your home, local coffee shop or resort. ?Fast, reliable internet is an absolute must.
* References: 3-5 necessary

If you're interested in this job, please send us the following information:
* we have over 1000 SKUs, 20 suppliers and 3 3PLs in the US. How would you keep track of all the inventory?
* what type of system would you build to ensure we never stock out but also never have too much inventory on hand at Amazon?
* Your experiences (written, video, audio) about how your past experiences have prepared you for the responsibilities of this job
* Your favorite business books and podcasts
* Resume including 3-5 references
* Your current salary and what you’d like to make at your next role