Operations Lead - Netherlands in Manchester

For fifty years, the biggest sportswear brands on earth have been selling you plastic. They did it because plastic is cheap, and they spent billions on marketing to make sure you never asked what you were wearing. We make premium men's activewear from natural fibres only. Ten years from now there will be a generational brand that took this fight to the incumbents and won. Right now the founder is the person who books the freight, chases the factory, sets up the products in Shopify and finds out first when a date slips. Booking freight, customs paperwork, ASNs, packing lists, carton labelling, set up correctly before the goods arrive, so nothing sits in a warehouse waiting to be received ~ Packaging orders on time and sent to suppliers so purchase orders don't get delayed. ~If the warehouse counts don't match the packing list, you know first and you've already raised it ~ You'll work with an external freight and customs specialist on classification, duty and tariff refunds, you own the paperwork and the follow-through ~ you own ex-works → freight → customs → 3PL receipt → live. Both halves live in one launch calendar, and if your date moves, you say so the day it moves, not when someone asks SKU naming, barcodes and product data across Shopify and both 3PLs, no discrepancies that cause a receiving or listing problem Returns-reason analysis, and process for reducing returns Look at every manual process you touch, decide it's not good enough, automate it with Claude, and write the SOP so it survives beyond you Do this well and you're Operations Lead within 12 months, running demand planning inputs and the 3PL relationships in two countries. Do that well and you're Head of Operations, with the ops hires under you. One to three years in operations, order management, supply chain or ecommerce ops, and you've outgrown being one cog in a big machine Excel and spreadsheets are second nature. Performance bonus, paid quarterly. Hybrid work with Northern Quarter Manchester office.