Product Development Specialist

We are looking for a modern product builder-not a traditional product manager who primarily manages calendars, documentation, and stage gates. This person will bring an outside-in view of culture, retail, materials, aesthetics, and consumer behavior; translate those signals into fresh products for our existing categories; and use AI-enabled tools to move from insight to tangible concept at exceptional speed.

You will have room to explore, challenge assumptions, and create. You will also be accountable for the economics. A visually exciting idea is only valuable when it solves a real consumer problem, can be sourced and manufactured responsibly, earns the required margin, and has a credible path to meaningful sales.

What You Will Own

• Build a continuous pipeline of differentiated product ideas within our 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. Develop 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 we should build, why it can win, what it should cost, how it should look, and what must be true for us to proceed.

How You Will Work

• AI-native: You treat ChatGPT as a thought partner and prototyping engine, not merely a writing assistant. You can show how AI has compressed your cycle from research to concept to decision.
• Trend fluent, commercially selective: You notice what is changing across consumer behavior, design, materials, retail, social platforms, and adjacent categories-and distinguish an actionable signal from noise.
• Fast and iterative: You are comfortable sharing an 80% concept, gathering feedback, and improving it in hours or days rather than waiting weeks for perfection.
• Design-minded: You have strong taste, visual judgment, and empathy for how consumers experience a product, even if your background is not traditional industrial design.
• Economically rigorous: You understand that cost is a design input. You can make intelligent feature, material, packaging, and price tradeoffs while protecting the product's reason to exist.
• Hands-on and low-ego: You generate the idea, build the brief, create the first prototype, call the supplier, review the sample, and solve the problem.
• Decisive under ambiguity: You can move with incomplete information, identify the few unknowns that matter most, and design a fast way to answer them.

The Profile We Value

We care more about evidence of modern product-building ability than a conventional title sequence. Strong candidates may come from product innovation, industrial or consumer design, entrepreneurship, merchandising, sourcing, brand creation, e-commerce, category strategy, or another path that combines creativity with commercial accountability.

• A portfolio or concrete examples showing products, concepts, prototypes, or businesses you helped create-and the decisions you personally drove.
• 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, and the resilience to manage multiple fast-moving concepts.
• Willingness to work on-site in the Greater St. Louis area and travel domestically or internationally when product discovery or supplier development requires it.

What This Role Is Not

• A coordinator role centered on maintaining trackers and scheduling meetings.
• A legacy stage-gate position where process substitutes for consumer insight and speed.
• A pure design role disconnected from sourcing, margin, sales potential, or operational reality.
• A trend-spotting role that stops at mood boards instead of producing decision-ready products.