Manager, Product Creation (Creation Center Sportswear Footwear)

Purpose & Overall Relevance for the Organization

Manage the respective Footwear Creation Hub responsibilities, ensuring successful product development, owning calendar and project planning to deliver against stated seasonal objectives and longer-term aspirations for the SPEED team. The role focuses mainly on key-account SMU requests and off-calendar Late-Add Projects for the Lifestyle Footwear business unit.

Key Responsibilities

• Work closely with Product Creation and Sourcing Partners to build strategies that achieve development excellence and industry-leading processes.
• Develop new products and concepts that exceed consumer expectations while meeting target costing.
• Help create an industry-leading speed and service model that enables the adidas brand to get closer to market needs.
• Identify business opportunities and risks, initiating key actions with relevant business-unit functions and cross-functional partners.
• Make decisions that enable progress, challenge the status quo, and deliver results.
• Create a powerful team spirit focused on exceeding short-, mid-, and long-term goals.
• Present the range internally and externally to HQ, Operations, Sourcing, and Tier 1 partners.
• Maintain and enhance product information systems.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Proven management skills and the ability to bring together internal and external cross-functional partners and resources.
• Experience interpreting design intent, offering alternative solutions, and guiding decisions with technical resources.
• Experience working with factory vendors to ensure and improve manufacturability.
• Highly organized and resilient, with a high tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to balance evolving priorities.
• Ability to participate in overlapping seasonal projects with competing resources and deadlines.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to adapt communication to the audience.
• Marketing, development, and sourcing experience suited to the Sportswear footwear business model, ideally with exposure to Design functions.
• Understanding of consumer markets, sporting goods, channel distribution, net sales, margins, profit, and inventory.
• Knowledge of taking products from conception through implementation preferred.
• Knowledge of footwear construction and development strongly preferred.
• Exposure to Special Make-Ups processes preferred.
• Good numerical and negotiation skills.
• Proficiency with Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Smartsheet.
• Ability to travel domestically and internationally.
• Ability to be agile and adaptive to new ways of working, overlapping calendars, and changing goals.

Minimum Qualifications

• Four-year college or university degree, preferably in Marketing or Business.
• Minimum five years of related experience.
• Equivalent education and/or experience may be substituted for a degree.
• Experience in footwear marketing and/or development.

Company Culture

At adidas, employees are encouraged to demonstrate courage, ownership, innovation, teamplay, integrity, and respect. The company emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion as core parts of its culture and talent processes.