Descrizione:
Remote (international) | Competitive salary + bonus | Full-time
Company Description
Nero is a premium activewear brand that specializes in crafting garments from all-natural, luxury-grade fabrics like merino wool. Designed for high-performance, its products support active lifestyles while eliminating the use of plastics. Nero combines sustainability with quality and innovation to create stylish and functional pieces.
Role Description
We're looking for a Production Manager to own everything from fabric order through ex-factory, the entire critical path that turns a tech pack into a finished garment in our customer's hands.
You'll own our mill and factory relationships across Italy, Portugal, and China. You'll manage fabric procurement, including the consignment and reserve positions we're building with our key mills. You'll run the production calendar across every SKU and every season. You'll be the person who makes sure that when we say a product is launching on a date, it actually launches on that date, at the quality we promised and the margin we modelled.
This is a senior, high-ownership role. You'll report directly to the founder, work alongside our demand planner and creative team.
What You'll Own
- Mill and fabric procurement. You'll manage relationships with our luxury fabric mills. You'll place fabric orders, negotiate pricing and lead times, and build out our consignment programme — securing rolling reserve positions of greige at our key mills so we never go four months out of stock on a hero SKU.
- Factory management. You'll own day-to-day relationships with our Portuguese and Asia manufacturing partners. PO discipline, critical path, sample approvals, bulk production, QC, all of it runs through you. You'll be on email, WhatsApp and WeChat daily with our factories, and open to business travel if needed.
- Production calendar and critical path. Every SKU has a path from tech pack to landed inventory. You'll own that timeline, manage the dependencies, and keep launches on schedule. When something slips, you'll be the person who solves it.
- Inventory and reorder triggers. Working with our demand planner, you'll translate demand forecasts into fabric orders, deposit payments, and production bookings. You'll run the days-of-cover system that tells us when to reorder, when to expand reserves, and when to pull back. You'll own the operational sheet that keeps the whole supply chain visible.
- Quality control. You'll manage our SGS and Intertek testing programme, work with factories on QC standards, and own the feedback loop when issues come back. You'll fight for the quality bar that defines the brand.
- Cost discipline. You'll own COGS at the line-item level — fabric, trims, make, freight, duty — and work with the founder to hit our margin targets.
Who You Are
- You've spent at least 6–8 years in production at a premium apparel brand.
- You know mills. You've placed orders with european mills before. You don't need anyone to explain what greige is, what a critical path looks like, or how to read a cost sheet. You've worked with Portuguese factories. China experience is a strong plus.
- You're numerate. You live in spreadsheets, you understand margin math, and you can run a planning model without help from a finance person. You'll be working in Google Sheets, building out trackers, and owning the operational data.
- You're hands-on. We're not a 200-person business with a team of coordinators below you. You'll be placing the orders, sending the WhatsApps, chasing the samples, and running the QC review yourself. That's the job, and it's the part that makes it interesting.
- You care about quality. You have strong opinions about fabrics, finishes, and construction, and you can defend them. You know the difference between a mill that says yes and a mill that delivers.
- You're comfortable in a small team and a fast environment. We're bootstrapped, lean, and moving quickly. Decisions happen fast, you'll have real ownership, and we expect you to bring solutions rather than escalate problems.
- You use AI properly. We don't want someone who does everything manually because that's how it's always been done. The right person here uses Claude, and whatever else gets the job done, drafting supplier emails, summarising lab reports, building tracker formulas, pulling structure out of messy data. If you're not already using AI to do your job 3x faster than your peers, this isn't the role for you. We move at the speed of leverage, not effort.
What We Offer
A competitive salary benchmarked to your experience, with a performance bonus tied to margin protection, on-time delivery, and quality metrics. Fully remote work with regular travel as needed. Real ownership over a function that genuinely matters to the business, with the runway to grow into a Head of Supply Chain role as the brand scales.
We're building Nero to be a category-defining brand over the next decade, the natural-fibre answer to Lululemon, Vuori, and On. If you want to be the person who builds the operational backbone that makes that possible, this is the role.