Sourcing Lead

Role: Sourcing Lead

Salary: $100,000 - $130,000

Location: Remote in the US

Manufactured is a venture backed inventory platform. We are building the first inventory exchange for SMBs creating, making, and selling physical products around the world. We serve customers doing $1M - $100M in annual revenues in Fashion, Accessories, Healthcare, Construction Materials, CPG, Food, Electronics, Home Goods, Industrials, and Commodities. 

With over 800+ vendors across 25 countries (and growing), we make the inventory cycle a breeze by handling everything from vendor discovery and negotiation to shipping, warehouse coordination, quality control, PO advances, through to collections. With over $150 million in volume powered by Manufactured since we launched in 2019, we deliver a compelling inventory partnership for fast growing SMBs. 

We are a post-Product Market Fit, Series A startup that is growing 850% Year on Year. There is tremendous opportunity in our ~30 person team to take ownership, make an impact, and build an extremely rewarding, accomplished career. 

We don’t care about: 

• Where you went to college
• What you studied
• If you’ve worked at blue chip companies 

We do care about: 

• What you’ve done
• What you can do
• How you’ll do it 

This looks like: 

• Making success a priority: We value ownership, initiative, and tenacity 
• Having a point of view: We hire smart people and want to hear opinions. We’re low ego, and we welcome feedback and new ideas informed by data and intuition 
• Being a good person and teammate: We all contribute to a positive, inclusive workplace. Direct communication, kindness, and integrity are non-negotiables 

You’ll be trusted and challenged to do your best work in a fast moving, high performing environment. If this sounds like you, please read on! 

Ideal Candidate Profile:

• Experience with Sourcing, Manufacturing and/or Supply Chain
• You've ideally sourced for large and small customers
• You’ve managed sourcing projects end to end and have developed vendors for multiple categories across multiple geographies
• You are able to identify good vendors, truly treat them as partners, drive price discovery with an understanding of basic material costs and assembly costs
• You have managed a team and can delegate projects and tasks while maintaining a sense of urgency 
• Ability to source products across numerous industries, including, but not limited to:
• Apparel and Textiles
• Fashion Accessories
• Beauty & Personal Care
• Consumer Electronics
• Tools & Hardware
• Food & Beverages
• Gifts & Crafts
• Health & Medical
• Home & Garden
• Office & School Supplies
• Packaging & Printing
• Rubber & Plastics
• Building Materials

High Level Expectations:

• Regular engagement with Business Development & Channel Partners to drive Sourcing to deliver intelligence on client needs
• Clear focus on Business / Transaction outcomes to drive vendor selection, product pricing and commercial terms
• Ensure that vendors are onboarded efficiently
• Prioritize and delegate all open sourcing activities
• Ability to drive authentic relationships with potential and current vendors across all categories
• Help shorten sales cycles from lead to close
• Collaborative mindset and team spirit
• Understand customer needs
• Experience in Private Label, White Label and Custom manufacturing
• Result oriented and over-communicative

Day to Day Responsibilities:

• Work in proprietary software application MFDSupply
• Thrive in a startup environment with empowered management and quick turnaround times
• Interactively sharing progress to stakeholders
• Clearly educate customers on Manufactured's product offerings
• Discover new vendors and capabilities across industries and geographies
• Maintain and update the vendor database to reflect accurate information on current and new vendors

Requirements and Skills:

• 6+ years experience
• 2+ years managing a team
• Sourcing experience in multiple industries
• Costing experience with multiple products
• Working directly with customers to drive transactions
• Past history of operating vendor databases and building vendor rating systems
• Extremely resourceful and appropriately frugal

Working at Manufactured:  

We’re a remote first company, based in Los Angeles. Our team is around thirty people, and growing quickly. 

Manufactured is a small, fast growing startup. Which means we deal with ambiguity and require a sense of ownership from all our team members. This is reflected in our core values. 

Our core values are: 

Urgency: Always act like an owner, seek help in case of delays beyond 48 hours, move quickly when you have enough information (usually 70-75%), know when to dive in if there’s a crisis, and hold true to the best possible timelines without compromising on quality, value or process.

Authenticity:  Be Authentic, be real, be respectful both, in front of and behind a person’s back. If you are frustrated, you’re frustrated. If you’re stuck, you’re stuck. If you’re worried, you’re worried. Let's support each other in resolving these issues. Be upfront and respectful in your conversation. We are a multi cultural, distributed, global team. Respectful authenticity in communication is critical.

Contextual Ownership: Our business is as much about people and relationships as it is about technology and process. We take time to build relationships and understand the needs of our internal and external partners. Context and empathy helps us understand the “why”. We set goals and drive outcomes based on context and realities, rather than tasks and process alone.

Effectiveness: Did it work? Did it solve the problem? Was it a short term hack? or a long term process solution that benefits everyone? Was it something we can use to grow / move forward or was it a defensive solution. Did we meet our stakeholders’ expectations, did we exceed them? Did our stakeholders all win? Are you using your time correctly? Are you helping your team members use their time well? Are you contributing to the growth of the company?

Critical path thinking:  "What is the shortest risk-mitigated route to the Best Potential Outcome?"

Our CEO and Founder, Pranay Srinivasan, writes often on LinkedIn about our culture and operating principles. We recommend these articles in particular: 

Our core values: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6993599543976099840/

Our operating framework: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pranaysrinivasan_08312022-a-big-part-of-our-work-at-manufactured-activity-6970875309470494720--bfv/