Associate Director Product Quality & Packaging

Are you passionate about e-commerce and creating a supply chain that will drive our business and elevate customer experience? Do you like the complexity of working in a global, rapidly growing and ‘big data’ focused company but also want the freedom to further build and strengthen a world-class product quality and packaging team? If so, we are looking for you to join our Supplier Operations team as the lead of European Product Performance. 

With more than 1.8 million products from over 3,000 suppliers (and growing!), Wayfair EU is embarking on a series of strategic supply chain initiatives that we believe will create a unique competitive advantage for our business. The Associate Director of Product Performance will play a central role in these initiatives with a specific focus on ensuring our suppliers have e-commerce suitable packaging and adequate product quality checks in place so that our products arrive at our customers without damages or defects.

We are looking for the right individual with an entrepreneurial spirit and deep passion for product quality and supply chain to help drive this critical team. With a mix of analytically driven strategic planning, extensive cross-functional collaboration as well as “on the ground” operations, this candidate must be able to thrive in an extremely fast-paced environment that continues to evolve rapidly. This is a highly visible and exciting role for in Wayfair EU and one that will offer the right candidate an opportunity to shape one of our core operational functions.

Responsibilities 

• Lead and execute the packaging and quality agenda for Wayfair EU across all suppliers and our logistic network to reduce incidence rates and improve customer experience
• Partner with European leadership within Category Management and Operations as well as our suppliers to develop and implement sustainable packaging and quality solutions
• Accountable for our incidence rate metrics and define a strategic plan and innovative approach to continuously reduce incidences
• Develop a close understand of suppliers’ operations and business and our logistic network to identify and drive improvement
• Maintain industry expertise; keep abreast of trends and new packaging and quality ideas and develop relationships with key industry players
• Visit suppliers and attend tradeshows to strengthen supplier relationships by providing expert packaging and quality advise and achieve improvement commitments
• Lead and develop a team of highly motivated product performance specialists and support them in achieving their business and career goals

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in progressive operational leadership with supply chain or operations expertise, either in industry or top tier / specialized packaging consulting company
• Bachelor’s degree in either a supply chain or business discipline, MBA a plus
• Excellent analytics skills and ability to think strategically and execute tactically within a dynamic, fast-paced organization and in close collaboration with our suppliers
• Entrepreneurial mindset with an ability to create and then transform ideas rapidly into actions
• Experience in building strong relationships with external and internal partners to achieve collective buy in
• Excellent written and oral communication skills and comfortably with senior management
• Strong leadership and change management skills, with ability to effectively manage and lead 25+ people across multiple sub-functions
• Passionate to develop and grow leaders and foster a results-driven, collaborative culture
• Fluency in English, in addition another European language preferred
• Willing to do occasional travel to other European Wayfair sites and visiting suppliers across EU