Brand Operations Manager

Location Hybrid – Seattle, WA (4 days in office to start, moving to three, after 12 months.)

Rate: $100,000 – $115,000k

The Role

The Brand Operations is responsible for intake, prioritization, and trafficking of creative work across Outdoor Research's DTC and Wholesale marketing functions. The role serves as the primary operational partner to the Design and Production teams keeping work moving, briefs clear, and timelines honest.

This is not a campaign ownership role. It is the organizational infrastructure that allows an 8-person brand team to execute at full capacity. The person in this role must carry enough commercial literacy to understand how sell-in and sell-through cycles shape wholesale creative timelines and enough cross-functional range to coordinate across brand, sales, finance, and planning without losing the thread.

Understanding Outdoor Performance categories is also a must.

What you’ll do

• Serve as the first point of contact for all creative requests from DTC & Wholesale stakeholders
• Own the team's project management system, maintain it, enforce adoption, and evolve it as the team's needs change
• Support GTM planning by maintaining the master brand calendar, ensuring all workstreams are accounted for and production timelines ladder up correctly to launch dates
• Assist in briefing seasonal creative needs across photo/video, design, and content in partnership with the Production team.
• DTC intake ownership (email, web, paid social, promotional)
• Wholesale creative trafficking (seasonal, sales tools, buyer events)
• Stakeholder communication across both teams
• Sell-in/sell-through calendar awareness

What This Role Is Not

This role does not own campaigns, set brand strategy, manage athletes, or direct creative work. It does not serve as a substitute for clear stakeholder briefs or act as an account manager for external agencies. It is not an entry-level coordinator position, and it is not a stepping stone for someone who ultimately wants to be a creative director or brand strategist.

The role requires genuine ambition around operations, process, and organizational craft not a temporary tolerance for it.

What Success Looks Like

• Brief quality and completeness at intake (reduction in revision cycles caused by unclear direction)
• Team capacity utilization: work is sequenced, not piled
• Stakeholder satisfaction across DTC and Wholesale on responsiveness and process clarity
• On-time delivery rates across DTC and Wholesale workstreams
• Project management system adoption and accuracy

Qualifications

• 4–6 years in a brand, agency, or marketing operations environment managing multiple concurrent workstreams.
• Strong project management instincts, has built systems, not just followed them
• Enough creative literacy to write a clear brief, give useful feedback, and know when something is off-brief.
• Familiarity with wholesale and retail commercial cycles understands how sell-in and sell-through timelines connect to creative production needs.
• Experience working across both wholesale/retail and DTC contexts is a genuine advantage.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment where priorities shift
• Low ego, high ownership, takes pride in making other people's work better, not in getting credit.
• Proficiency in project management tools (Asana); familiarity with creative production workflows.

What do we bring to the table?

• 11 paid holidays each year and 3 floating holidays
• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans
• PTO/PSST
• Transportation benefits
• Paid volunteer time
• 401(k) with discretionary company match
• Bouldering wall and work out rooms
• Ron Gregg – annual get outdoors benefit
• Product discounts
• Employee interest groups including various sports activities

Outdoor Research is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, age, sex, religion, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, gender identity or expression, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law.