Senior Category Manager
Bloom & Wild
Operations
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Posted on Oct 23, 2024
bloomon is turning the flower industry on its head – for the better. How? By disrupting the traditional supply chain! We skip the auction and wholesale, to shorten the journey for our flowers. And we harness technology, brand and innovation to deliver gifts and subscriptions that delight our customers across Europe.
We launched in Amsterdam in 2014, and in 2021 joined forces with Bloom & Wild, the UK's fastest growing ecommerce company (according to the Financial Times). Our group is backed by top tier investors and is now home to a family of 3 strong brands, Bloom & Wild, bloomon and Bergamotte. Together, we’ve delivered over 20 million orders (and counting!), making us the largest direct to consumer flower business in Europe.
Our vision is to create the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful. And we won't stop at flowers and plants. Starting with the Bloom & Wild brand, we're expanding our gifting offering to other categories like cakes, candles and cocktails. This is all part of our ambition to build Europe's #1 direct to consumer gifting destination.
We care wildly about people and our planet. Which is why we’re so proud to be a certified B Corp™ – committed to making long-term positive change for our community, and the world around us.
🛠️ Range @ bloomon
Over the past 10 years, bloomon has spread happiness to customers with products and designs that are distinctly bloomon. We are most known for our Original bouquets, which can be characterised for its wide variety of flowers, complementary colour schemes and spaciousness. We have steadily expanded our product range with various bouquet styles to attract and serve a broader audience and other categories, such as dried flowers, plants and other seasonal products (wreaths, mini trees, easter branches). We offer a small selection of products on subscription and all of them as one-offs in our gift shop.
We expect to optimise our product range further in the coming years and we constantly make improvements to our products and bouquet designs to keep surprising subscribers, gifters and receivers. We love to make art and commerciality come together - we inspire our customers but also test, learn and optimise what we do.
🛠️ Range Team
You will be part of the Brand & Range team, a happy bunch of 8 colleagues with all different responsibilities. We brought these teams together as our brand and products are so closely linked. The Brand team is responsible for driving and executing on the campaign calendar in alignment with our Commercial and Marketing teams. The Range team is responsible for the ideation and execution of the range calendar with physical products across markets - from initial concept, through product development to launch. We obviously work closely together with the Brand team to communicate about our product ranges through a campaign lens, but we also work cross-functionally with many other teams across the business to support our decision-making. We perform our own research and use our dashboards, and gather insights with the help of the Business Intelligence and Research teams; collaborate with the Supply Chain teams on execution of the product range, and ensure the commercial teams are happy with the product ranges we develop. We have a close link with the Product team to ensure our range is easily shoppable on site and look as appealing as possible; our Merchandiser is responsible for this.
⚙️What you'll be doing:
You work mostly where the flower magic happens in Amstelveen, collaborate closely with all teams in bloomon - but mainly Supply Chain, Commercial and BI - and will report to the Director of Brand and Range. You will be responsible for bloomon’s Fresh, Dried and Plant categories and will act as key contact person for these categories within the business. You manage our two floral designers, who are responsible for designing our Fresh and Dried ranges as well as seasonal products (e.g. wreaths). You love to create and present insights - also to creatives who are less comfortable with spreadsheets and numbers. All of this to implement learnings, and create even better products and future collections. Your responsibilities will fall into 3 key areas:
Physical Product:
- Manage and lead a team of two floral designers
- Be responsible for collection timelines, ensuring smooth progression from trend research to final sign-off
- Lead weekly bouquet review meetings, where the floral designers present their work
- Ensure collection learnings and a commercial output are reflected in the work presented
- Collaborate closely with the Supply Chain team to continuously improve processes and adopt industry innovations
- Drive new launches and product development for hardware: collaborating with existing suppliers to develop beautiful ceramic and glass products, as well as sourcing new suppliers
- Communicate with production and fulfilment teams to align on upcoming products
- Brief and review asset creation to the brand team: including copy and imagery for website
- Keep the range calendar on track and communicate any range changes to key stakeholders
- Own the development of seasonal ranges, such as wreaths and mini Christmas trees.
Customer Experience:
- Support the Creative and Brand team in generating assets for each collection and campaign that carefully showcase our flowers and set them up for success
- Provide input for initiatives to highlight and capitalise on the key features of each collection via online merchandising, newsletters, and other channels
- Collaborate with the Commercial teams to identify opportunities to boost category performance and ensure continuous improvement of the range offering.
Category Insights:
- Analyse collection performance data, collaborating closely with the BI team to inform future designs
- Collaborate with Forecast and Trade teams to map out sales predictions and range planning
- Own category performance reporting and champion key metrics for customer satisfaction and sales
- Conduct competitor benchmarking in core markets and trend spotting to drive innovation and maintain a competitive edge
- Maintain clear documentation of category insights as a business-wide resource.
✅ You’ll love this role if you…
- You have a strategic mindset, strong commercial view and a flair for creativity. You’re results-focused, comfortable with setting and measuring KPIs across your team’s work
- You work at pace on your own projects and coach your team to prioritise and execute, with an ability to multitask under pressure.
- You’re a confident leader, able to flex your coaching style to get the best from your team.
- You’re a team player, keen to be hands-on and supportive to your teammates in the belief that our successes come as a team. But you’re also comfortable guiding, evaluating, and if necessary, redirecting your team’s work and will get stuck in wherever it’s needed.
- You’re a creative problem solver who is solutions orientated and raises issues or unexpected problems early to ensure success.
- You’re confident and clear in presenting your work to your peers and senior stakeholders, and can tailor your communication to different audiences.
✅ You will have:
- 5-6 years experience Preferably in a product development and/or category management role, with a proven track record of understanding data, delivering a quality customer experience, hitting KPIs and managing a team
- Driven You are enthusiastic, passionate and keen to deliver results with impact
- Attention to detail You’re methodical and precise and really take care in your work so that you deliver to a consistently excellent standard
- Analytical You’ll be comfortable working with our range dashboard and large sheets of data, extracting meaningful insights and shaping plans
- Proactive & Resourceful You take responsibility and initiative to get things done, willing to roll up your sleeves and independently get stuck in to find solutions
- Organised You’ll be on top of the many different workstreams that you’re involved in, delivering your work on time
- Stakeholder management You’ll keep all of your stakeholders up to date and well informed, understanding what is important to them, keeping your communication efficient and effective
- Creative eye You’ll have an appreciation and eye for the key details that make up great design, and be able to brief and discuss those with designers
- Customer empathy You put customers first, seek to understand what works for them and champion them in your decision making to develop products they love. You’re motivated by this above all else.
These are some of the skills and experience we think will enable success in this role, but please don’t worry if you are missing some of these. We’re committed to building a team made up of different strengths, skills and experiences, so if you’re excited about our values, passionate about what you do and would like to join us in doing things more thoughtfully, we’d love to hear from you.
🏡 Belonging at Bloom & Wild Group
We know that we learn through our differences, and building a diverse team has always been central to creating the best experience for our customers. We value all backgrounds, perspectives, ideas and experiences, and encourage everyone to share their opinions openly within our caring and inclusive team.
🧭 Our ways of working
We do things a little bit differently. From inventing letterbox flowers to founding The Thoughtful Marketing Movement. We’re big on collaboration, empathy, knowledge sharing and growth, and our values drive our priorities every day:
Lead change for good: we have the guts to try new things and step up to do what matters most
Think deeply, act swiftly: we make sure there’s thoughtful rationale behind our approach and always act swiftly to implement ideas
Care wildly: we pour care and creativity into everything we do and pay attention to the things that make a difference
Stay open, be curious: we’re open about what we’re doing and why, and we welcome challenges from each other
We really believe in the power of face-to-face connections - be that through a shared project, a learning and development opportunity, or an after work social - and trust our teams to make the right decisions (for them and us) about where and how they work each day. Our working patterns are flexible and vary across the business, depending on the type of work, need for collaboration, and personal and wellbeing circumstances.
🌟 (Some of) The good stuff
To care wildly for our customers, firstly we care wildly for our teams. We work hard to craft a culture of thoughtfulness and care, where there is a strong sense of inclusion and belonging, enabling all of our people to thrive and be successful each day.
🌻 Work that works for you
- Flexible working (core hours from 10-4pm)
- Work Abroad for up to 30 days each year
- Share in our success with a choice to take equity options from day 1
- 1 day per year to volunteer on a project that’s close to your heart
- We’ll support your commute to our office and site locations. Depending on your journey to work, this may include a Swapfiets, an NS business card or expense reimbursement
- Phone allowance
🌴 Time off
- 24 vacation days and an option to buy an extra 5 each year
- Happiness days (1 extra day each quarter for your personal ‘me time’)
- 1 celebration day per year, to celebrate a holiday that’s important to you
- Flexible bank holidays - trade a bank holiday for another day that fits your beliefs, values and celebration calendar
🌱 Health and wellbeing
- Mental health support through Open Up, including access to online therapy sessions
- Allies and champions groups
- Mental Health First Aiders and awareness training for our managers
- In person and virtual yoga every week
- Our office kitchen is stocked with healthy drinks and snacks to keep you going
- Workplace pension contributions
🌳 Growth & Development
- A flexible training framework for every stage of your career development through our Bloom & Learn programme
- Internal & external Speaker Sessions on a variety of different inspirational topics.
💐 Moments that matter
- We love having lunch together! We offer daily fresh and healthy lunch options at our locations in Amsterdam and Amstelveen,
- A BBQ-worthy rooftop terrace (Amsterdam HQ)
- Social & wellbeing monthly calendar
- We love to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and other important milestones!
- Summer and End of Year events, team lunches and post-peak celebrations
- Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!
🫱🫲 Getting hired
We know that job searching can be daunting, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that your experience with us is a good one. Interviewing is a 2-way process, and we’re keen to answer all of the questions you have, so that you can be sure (and excited!) that we’re the right move for you.
If your application is successful, you can expect to have a brief 30-minute chat with Estelle, to run through your experience, motivations and the role in more detail. After this you will have a first interview with Marie-Flore (Brand & Range Director), followed by a case study (interview) if successful - including Theo (Commercial team NL/BE). Your final interview will be with Charlotte (Chief Marketing Officer). Ideally we go through this process in 3-4 weeks from your first interview.
We believe in leading change for good, so do let us know if there’s anything we can do to support your application process. Also, if you have any feedback, please help us to improve our candidate experience by sharing (anonymously) here.