Senior Costing & Material - Converse

Become part of the Converse Team. Converse is a place to explore potential, break barriers, and push out the edges of what can be. Its culture embraces diversity, rewards imagination, and encourages people to grow, think, dream, and create.

The Apparel/Accessories Cost & Material team is part of Converse Global Sourcing and Manufacturing (GSM). The team drives product excellence through a sustainable cost engineering model and serves as both a subject-matter expert and change leader in Converse costing.

Key responsibilities

• Establish and continuously update cost models, benchmarks, fair standards, and tools to enable transparent, sustainable, and competitive costing for Converse products.
• Collaborate with factory partners, merchandising, product creation, planning, sourcing, and other functions to resolve product costing challenges and improve overall product margin.
• Monitor factory costing performance and drive product cost excellence and best practices through process optimization.
• Provide analytics for cost-related business decisions and company strategy, including analysis, tracking, and reporting of cost-driver impacts.
• Act as the direct Converse Costing contact for assigned Tier 1 and Tier 2 factory partners.

Core accountabilities

• Manage and improve factory cost and material performance.
• Analyze improvement areas, create strategies, and execute plans and projects to improve factory costing competitiveness and accuracy.
• Design, implement, and review cost and material matrices and benchmarks.
• Lead Converse functions in solving costing and material issues for responsible factories.
• Collect, clarify, and analyze manufacturing information from factories and market research.
• Track and report cost drivers, review their impact with line managers, and execute solutions.
• Design and launch costing tools such as matrices, libraries, and calculators.
• Research cost trends, challenges, and risks, and provide analytics and recommendations to leadership.

Costing, material, operation, process, and system improvement

• Drive system, process, and workflow improvements and execute related projects with other Converse functions.
• Lead costing analysts in managing costing data and system reports efficiently.
• Maintain cost data accuracy.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or above and a minimum of 6 years of relevant work experience.
• Experience in apparel or accessories costing, materials, industrial engineering, manufacturing operations, or production.
• Good knowledge of apparel or relevant textile products and manufacturing costs; industrial engineering experience is a plus.
• Strong project management, communication, and analytical presentation skills.
• Experience leading and training teammates, with a can-do attitude and ability to drive change.
• Good written and verbal English communication skills; Mandarin is a plus.
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook; Macro/VBA is a plus.

Converse is a worldwide advocate for self-expression and offers employees opportunities to create and grow professionally, along with generous benefits packages.