About This Role
This role is for a modern product builder who can identify meaningful product opportunities within existing categories, quickly develop compelling concepts, and prove their market viability and profitability. The specialist will bring an outside-in view of culture, retail, materials, aesthetics, and consumer behavior to translate signals into fresh products, utilizing AI-enabled tools for rapid concept development.
Responsibilities
- Build a continuous pipeline of differentiated product ideas within established categories, grounded in consumer needs, emerging trends, competitive gaps, retail signals, and marketplace data
- Use ChatGPT and other generative-AI tools as an everyday product-development workspace for research synthesis, concept generation, design iteration, visual briefs, quick product renderings, packaging directions, feature comparisons, and decision support
- Move rapidly from a rough idea to a clear concept: consumer problem, target user, feature set, materials, dimensions, aesthetic direction, prototype visuals, target cost, target retail price, and reason to believe
- Create and refine quick prototypes with AI, designers, engineers, suppliers, and sample makers
- Know when a fast visual is enough to make a decision and when physical validation is required
- Bring fresh design language, colors, materials, finishes, form factors, and use cases into existing product categories without chasing trends that lack commercial durability
- Build the product economics early, developing target landed cost, MSRP, channel margin, contribution margin, freight and duty assumptions, packaging impact, minimum order implications, and sensitivity scenarios before a concept advances
- Evaluate opportunities for Amazon, DTC, social commerce, and retail channels, recognizing that the winning feature set, price architecture, and storytelling may differ by channel
- Write sharp product briefs that give sourcing, design, packaging, content, and marketing partners what they need to act quickly
- Work directly with domestic and international suppliers to assess feasibility, negotiate toward cost targets, improve prototypes, and resolve tradeoffs without diluting the core consumer benefit
- Kill weak ideas early, learn quickly from failed concepts, and keep the strongest opportunities moving with urgency and ownership
- Present a clear point of view to leadership: what to build, why it can win, what it should cost, how it should look, and what must be true to proceed
Requirements
- Evidence of modern product-building ability
- Portfolio or concrete examples showing products, concepts, prototypes, or businesses helped create, and the decisions personally driven
- Demonstrated use of ChatGPT, image-generation tools, or related AI workflows to improve research, ideation, design communication, prototyping, or speed to market
- Strong understanding of consumer-product economics, including landed cost, margin, price positioning, MOQ, freight, duties, packaging, and channel fees
- Ability to interpret marketplace data, reviews, competitive assortments, search behavior, social signals, and retail activity without allowing spreadsheets to replace judgment
- Experience collaborating directly with designers, engineers, sourcing teams, manufacturers, or overseas suppliers
- Clear written and visual communication
- Strong prioritization
- Resilience to manage multiple fast-moving concepts
- Willingness to work on-site in the Greater St. Louis area
- Willingness to travel domestically or internationally when product discovery or supplier development requires it
Important Details
About the Company
The company is a family-owned enterprise specializing in consumer products and innovative solutions for everyday challenges. It designs, develops, markets, and distributes its product lines directly to consumers through social-commerce platforms, as well as to major global retailers. Its product collections focus on home and housewares, impulse items, pet supplies, health and beauty, and automotive appearance accessories.
