Category Manager Bicycle

Our mission to create urban freedom for happier lives. We make more than just a bicycle, and we are more than just a bicycle company. We want to increase people’s freedom, improve their health and reduce long term impact on the environment.

We continue to make the Brompton in West London, where we started in 1975, but our product has travelled far - we now export 80% of our bicycles to 52 countries. The recent cycling boom is one of many we’ve ridden, but our product has steadily gained a larger following, as increased urbanisation, crowding on public transport and more modern, complex and flexible lifestyles all create the same macro trends.

To change urban living, we need passionate, innovative and talented people that want to make an impact.

The Role

The Category Manager Bicycle is instrumental in the implementation of our 5-year strategy. Brompton has an incredible innovation pipeline, starting with the recent product launch of P Line in November ’22. This role will balance continuous improvement of core products with new launches, from our messaging to the specifications.

The role will require gathering of market feedback, from consumer, customer and broader market data. This then needs to be balanced with the company objectives and capabilities to underpin the product roadmap. Being vertically integrated brings tremendous opportunities alongside complexity.

The successful candidate will be involved in all areas of bicycle development, launch and lifecycle management. Working cross functionally with product development, engineering and design, marketing, sales, customer service, production and other core operations functions. The majority of the time will be spent at our Greenford factory and headquarter, hybrid home office working and with limited requirement for global travel.

Main Duties 

Plan & Develop

• Acquire and implement key outputs from market insight, dealer engagement, consumer insights including both quantitative and qualitative research, internal requirements and future product developments to meet commercial targets and KPIs.
• Create thorough business cases for new developments based on potential market size and realistic cost and time implications of new developments. Manage these alongside current workloads for internal teams. Ensure products pass through relevant internal sign-off gates.
• Work with product development, production and purchasing on development of continuous improvements, addition of colours or specifications to the core line. Aid implementation of process and project manage where required.
• Product Lifecycle Management – Ensure timely ramp down of specification alongside new launches working with P+A and planning teams.
• Key contributor to S&OP planning cycle and roadmap development. Working closely with the NPI, sales and planning teams to bring a single view of demand creation on a monthly basis.

Deliver & Launch

• Chair weekly commercial meetings with stakeholders from marketing, sales and customer service to update them on the status and follow up on commercial activities and projects.

• Project management support of individual projects, identification of key milestones, monitoring schedules and providing visibility to the business of progress.

• Initiate trade communications content and follow up with marketing and sales. Ensure key commercial and marketing information is aligned along different sites, platforms and documents to all relevant markets.
• Work with creative department and marketing team to deliver best possible visibility and transference of product benefits with each launch. Aid the ecommerce team to maximise the potential of any new product launches with best-in-class product information.

• Work with contributors across sales and pricing, both for launch pricing and annually updates, ensuring globally appropriate offering.

Evaluate & Improve

• Use evaluation of key metrics to help inform the budget process, evaluate and review performance indicators weekly and monthly alongside global strategy. Including consumer satisfaction, sales, production volumes and order intake.
• Develop market understanding through visits to and feedback from dealers, trade shows and industry press, regular consumer interactions and insight development. Use strong dealer relationships to promote feedback loops into new developments, recognising issues quickly and pushing the product proposition forward.
• Identify opportunities for sales growth and work with regions / channels to implement.
• Holistic view of product profitability, including elements like logistics, warehousing, marketing costs and others where optimisation can deliver profitability.

Job requirements

Qualifications or Experience

• Five years’ experience in a commercial, product, marketing or sales management role for a global brand or manufacturer (Essential)
• Line management experience (Essential)
• The commercial experience to develop and work with financial models to develop product pricing, P&L etc (Essential)
• Experience of best-in-class product planning and delivery (Desirable)
• Preferable to have an understanding of the Electric bike market in the EU, ideally supported with strong connections to other parts of the cycle industry (Desirable)

Personal Requirements

• Culturally aware and able to interface well with internal and external stakeholders globally.
• Comfortable with presenting and influencing all levels of an organization, especially senior management.
• Self-motivated and proactive - able to work in a fast-moving and entrepreneurial environment.
• Enjoys cycling or passionate about cycling as a transport solution.