Design Production Manager — Craighill (Brooklyn, NY)

Compensation: $75,000–$85,000 | Full-Time | On-Site

About Craighill

Launched in 2015, Craighill is a Brooklyn-based design studio and brand creating enduring, beautiful, and useful objects for everyday life. Rooted in curiosity and craftsmanship, we design and produce products that celebrate material, process, and enduring quality.

We work with manufacturing partners around the world to bring our designs to life at a level of craft that sets us apart. As we grow, we’re building the team and systems to support that growth without compromising what makes our products special.

Role Overview

The Design Production Manager is the primary point of contact between Craighill and our manufacturing partners. You’ll own all vendor communication across the full product lifecycle, from the first sample request on a new product through years of ongoing production reorders.

This role sits on the operations team, reports to the Director of Operations, and works closely with the Director of Design. It’s built for someone who is deeply empathetic to the creative process, obsessive about quality and timelines, and has a natural drive to keep a complex system running smoothly. You’re not a designer, but you understand and respect what designers do, and you create the conditions for them to do their best work.

By consolidating all vendor-facing communication under one role, we ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, that our manufacturing partners have a consistent and reliable counterpart at Craighill, and that our designers can stay focused on design. You’ll be the person who turns design and productions decisions into clear external communications.

Key Responsibilities

Vendor Communication & Relationship Management

• Serve as the primary point of contact for all manufacturing vendors across every stage — sampling, pre-production, production, and reorders.

• Manage all vendor correspondence ensuring timely and clear communication across time zones.

• Build and maintain strong, respectful vendor relationships that lead to better pricing, better shipping terms, and better products over time.

• Maintain a vendor contact directory covering all key external relationships, including contact details, communication preferences, payment terms, and relationship context.

Sampling & Pre-Production

• Take deliverables prepared by the design team — CAD exports, annotated screenshots, finish requirements, specifications — and package them into clear, complete communications to vendors for sample requests, tooling orders, and pricing quotes.

• Track sample and pre-production timelines and follow up with vendors to ensure samples arrive on schedule; deliver samples to the design team for review.

• Schedule third-party product inspections before shipments leave the factory, and coordinate corrections with vendors based on results.

Systems & Data Management

• Create and manage all products in ERP (Brightpearl): SKU setup, UPC creation, case pack UPCs, and new variant additions.

• Manage purchase orders in ERP and receive POs once our 3PL warehouse confirms receipt, matching units against what was ordered.

• Actualize freight costs against POs in ERP so that landed cost data is always current.

• Create and maintain operations cost sheets for all products and work with Ecomm Operations Manager to ensure accuracy across sytems.

• Use cost data to inform MSRP recommendations based on target margins, and flag margin concerns to the Director of Operations.

Production & Purchase Order Management

• Place purchase orders with vendors, confirming timelines, quantities, and production details.

• Follow up with vendors on a structured cadence confirming production is on track and requesting freight quotes at the appropriate time.

• Communicate delays to leadership and marketing so launch schedules, email campaigns, and customer communications can be adjusted proactively.

• Evaluate and approve freight quotes based on margin impact and urgency, in consultation with the Director of Operations.

• Review and approve production invoices weekly in Bill.com, flagging discrepancies or issues to the finance team.

Quality Control & Vendor Accountability

• Communicate quality standards to vendors, clearly defining what Craighill will and will not accept for each product.

• When defective product is identified, document the issue, communicate it to the vendor, and negotiate credits, replacements, or corrective action.

• Escalate major quality failures to the Director of Design and Director of Operations for vendor-level conversations.

• Track quality issues by vendor and product to identify patterns and drive improvement over time.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of experience in production management, design operations, or product development operations — ideally in a physical product environment such as industrial design, consumer goods, architecture, or similar.

• Experience managing vendor or supplier relationships, particularly with international manufacturing partners.

• Strong written communication skills; you are clear, thorough, and organized in emails and documentation.

• Comfortable working across spreadsheets, ERP systems, and project management tools. Experience with Brightpearl or similar platforms is a plus but not required.

• Genuine appreciation for design and craft, with enough fluency in the design process to understand what matters and why.

• Highly organized with a natural inclination toward systems, follow-through, and keeping complex workstreams on track.

• Resourceful and pragmatic; comfortable with ambiguity in a growing company where the role will continue to evolve.

Personal Attributes

• Organized and Relentless: You love a tight system and you maintain it with discipline. Balls don’t get dropped on your watch.

• Empathetic and Communicative: You build warm, productive relationships with vendors, teammates, and partners across cultures and time zones.

• Design-Literate: You appreciate great design and understand the process well enough to represent it in external communications.

• Quality-Obsessed: You care deeply about the details — the finish, the packaging, the timeline — and you hold vendors and yourself to high standards.

• Proactive and Independent: You don’t wait to be told what to do. You see what needs to happen and you make it happen.

• Values-Driven: You embody Craighill’s principles of Ingenuity, Empathy, Endurance, and Wonder.

Why Craighill

Joining Craighill means helping to build the connective tissue between design and production at a brand that cares equally about both. You’ll work alongside a tight, talented design team and a growing operations function, playing a central role in making sure the objects we create reach the world at the quality they deserve.

If you’re energized by the intersection of design, production, and operational precision and you want to be the person who makes it all come together, we’d love to hear from you.

Instructions to Apply

To apply, please submit the following to jobs@craighill.co. 

• Resume
• Cover Letter
• 2 professional references
• Salary request
• A brief description of a time you improved an operational process or system, including measurable impact