Position Overview

The Senior Director, Global Category Merchandising - Hydration leads the global strategy, merchandising, line architecture, and commercial performance for Stanley 1913's Hydration category. The role integrates consumer insights, competitive dynamics, and financial goals to build a profitable, channel-right, culturally relevant global assortment.

This leader translates brand vision and market intelligence into multi-year roadmaps, pricing architecture, lifecycle strategies, and innovation opportunities. They operate cross-functionally to drive long-range growth while ensuring seasonal excellence and detailed global go-to-market execution.

With significant P&L influence, this role develops the future of the Hydration category through strategic vision, strict commercial execution, and global leadership-ensuring the category remains culturally iconic, commercially strong, and positioned for sustained growth.
What You'll Do
Global Category Strategy & Ownership

• Own the comprehensive worldwide merchandising strategy for Hydration, ensuring alignment with brand vision, enterprise financial goals, and regional market opportunities.
• Own seasonal line architecture and multi-year category roadmaps, driving a profitable, consumer-right assortment across channels and geographies.
• Define segmentation strategies across wholesale, DTC, marketplace, and e-commerce channels to ensure channel-right assortments and profitable market penetration.
• Act as the global category authority in pre-line, line reviews, executive forums, and key account presentations.

Product portfolio & lifecycle management

• Define and optimize the global product portfolio through data-driven insights, supervising SKU productivity, lifecycle planning, margin performance, and franchise management.
• Lead SKU rationalization and complexity reduction initiatives to improve efficiency and margin health.
• Partner with Product and Design to shape innovation pipelines, identify whitespace opportunities, and guide new product initiatives rooted in consumer and driven insights.
• Ensure focused product lifecycle management from concept through product retirement.

Pricing & commercial architecture

• Own global pricing frameworks and price architecture, ensuring alignment with market positioning, consumer expectations, and financial targets.
• Partner closely with Planning and Sales to align pricing strategy with margin optimization, channel strategy, and revenue planning.
• Evaluate competitive landscape, elasticity, and regional pricing dynamics to guide strategic trade-offs.

Insights, market analysis & forecasting

• Coordinate comprehensive market, consumer, and competitive analyses to advise assortment decisions, positioning strategies, and segmentation models.
• Synthesize category analytics into revenue planning, margin forecasting, and enterprise-level long-range planning inputs.
• Leverage sell-in and sell-through performance metrics to refine strategies in response to market shifts and demand signals.

Go-to-market leadership

• Advise the global GTM process for Hydration, ensuring seasonal readiness, launch alignment, and cross-functional clarity across Merchandising, Product, Sales, Marketing, and Supply Chain.
• Lead development of merchandising tools and selling assets, including line plans, merchandising guides, price architecture frameworks, and sell-in/sell-through storytelling.
• Ensure product positioning and communication strategies are cohesive, compelling, and market-relevant across global regions.

Cross-functional & organizational leadership

• Lead and influence a high-performing global merchandising team, fostering strong people leadership and talent development.
• Partner seamlessly with Product, Sales, Marketing, Insights, Planning, Finance, Operations and the Regional Teams to ensure alignment from strategy to execution.
• Actively remove blockers, manage high-stakes trade-offs, and serve as the decision-maker in sophisticated category issues.
• Ensure merchandising plans are implemented with precision and operational rigor.

Long-range growth & innovation

• Champion the 3-5 year long-range plan for Hydration, identifying expansion vectors across product innovation, regional growth, and channel development.
• Stay ahead of emerging industry trends, consumer behaviors, sustainability expectations, and competitive innovations.
• Balance breakthrough growth opportunities with disciplined financial stewardship.

Who You Are

• Bachelor's degree in Merchandising, Business, Marketing, Finance, Retail Management, or equivalent.
• 12+ years of progressive merchandising, category management, or product strategy experience, including senior/global leadership.
• Proven success in assortment planning, pricing architecture, lifecycle management, and large-scale go-to-market execution.
• Experience leading global or multi-region category strategies with meaningful P&L ownership.
• Expertise in product lifecycle management, SKU rationalization, segmentation, and pricing strategy.
• Solid understanding of consumer behavior, market trends, and competitive analysis.
• Sophisticated financial acuity in budgeting, forecasting, margin optimization, and sales analysis.
• Ability to align merchandising, marketing, and sales strategies for successful global launches.
• Knowledge of wholesale, DTC, e-commerce, and marketplace channels.
• Proficiency with PLM systems (e.g., Centric), ERP platforms, and sophisticated Excel modeling.
• Strong data synthesis and executive-level interpersonal skills.
• Ability to adapt strategies quickly to market and business shifts.
• Tried people leadership with experience building and scaling high-performing global teams.

Stanley 1913 is a total rewards company, which includes rewards beyond base salary. At Stanley 1913, full-time employees are eligible for an annual bonus, based on company and individual results. In addition, we offer a variety of employee benefits, personalized time off, 14-Paid holidays, dental, vision, 401(k), and much more.

The base pay range for this position is for a successful candidate within the state listed. The successful candidate's actual pay will be based on multiple factors such as work location, job-related knowledge, skills, qualifications, and experience.

Salary Range

$200,000-$230,000 USD