Category Manager

Summary

Join OLIPOP as a Category Manager and drive high-impact category management across small-format channels. This data-driven role involves analyzing market trends, supporting the sales team, building category narratives, and presenting insights to key customers. You will leverage data to understand customers, identify trends, and suggest improvements. The ideal candidate possesses strong analytical skills, experience in the consumer packaged goods industry, and excellent communication abilities. This fast-paced environment offers opportunities for personal growth and responsibility within a fully remote team.

Requirements

• 4+ years consumer packaged goods industry experience within an insights function or role; beverage experience a plus
• Must be a highly adaptable strategic thinking that is willing to be a curious and creative problem solver
• Extensive experience in understanding consumer needs and the retail environment
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel, including capabilities in data manipulation, cleaning, and formatting techniques such as VLOOKUPs, pivot tables, and other formula-based operations. Demonstrated experience in not only utilizing but also designing and building complex dashboards, analytical tools, and reporting mechanisms to effectively communicate insights and drive strategic decision-making
• Strong ability to connect the dots from data to building a comprehensive narrative to grow our brand and business
• A thorough understanding of both syndicated and consumer panel data as well as the provider's platforms/portals (IRI/Circana, SPINS, NielsenIQ, Numerator...etc.)
• Ability to draw conclusions from large amounts of data and summarize findings in a concise manner and in a compelling way
• An acute attention to detail, but not to the point of being inflexible, and the ability to produce accurate work quickly & efficiently
• Excellent interpersonal skills, and the ability to effectively communicate with customers, distributors and the internal executives
• Full competence with Microsoft and Google Suite, and familiar with collaboration tools such as Slack and Zoom
• Eagerness to learn and adapt to new software and technologies

Responsibilities

• Investigate overall market trends and conduct detailed analyses to develop key insights about the business in various channels and in different geographies. This role will primarily support the small format Key Account Team within the channels of convenience, drug, military, & foodservice
• Serve as the data expert for our sales team; manage and prioritize incoming requests; use data to better understand our customers, identify trends and proactively suggest improvements
• Gather, organize, and analyze our data and translate results into dashboards that are actionable and digestible by all teams
• Determine the positioning of a product category to maximize assortment & space
• Lead the development of customer specific category insights presentations and present to key retail customers and distributors alongside your sales team leads
• Support the Commercial Planning team with specific insights tied to the broader commercial vision and growth of the organization
• Research trends, discrepancies, & insights that and bring ideas for trade spend, space planning, & category narrative improvement/efficiencies
• Educate sales team counterparts on how to interpret data within reports and arrive quickly at key takeaways and action items
• Continually evaluate best practices and explore new approaches and tools to enhance our overall analytics strategy

Benefits

$90,000-$110,000 base salary + bonus