We The Wild is an Australian plant care brand on a mission to make the world a little greener, cleaner and freer. Our 100% organic, scientifically tested products sit on shelves across Australia and the US — and our pipeline is full of new products waiting to be born.
We're hiring a Product Development Manager to develop new products and packaging iterations from concept to first production run, across both markets. You'll own the messy, satisfying work of NPD: sourcing factories in China, engineering landed COGS, briefing samples, chasing technical dossiers, and making sure every piece of product and packaging that leaves a factory floor looks unmistakably We The Wild.
What you'll do- Source factories across our network of our suppliers and through Alibaba, Global Sources and trade shows. Cast wide (10+ candidates per RFQ), shortlist 3 for sampling.
- Build BOMs and model landed COGS across MOQ, freight and tooling scenarios. Negotiate cost without burning suppliers.
- Drive samples to sign-off against our brand and quality bar. Know when to iterate vs. walk.
- Pull together technical dossiers (COA, MSDS, formulation breakdowns, OMRI/organic certs, labelling specs) and hand them clean to our regulatory partner for US and AU filings.
- Push factories to deliver on-brand artwork and packaging without creative direction at every step.
- Run 5–10 NPD workstreams in parallel through stage gates in Monday. You own the tracker.
- Use AI tools daily (Claude etc) across sourcing, RFQs, supplier comms, BOM analysis and dossier review.
You'll report to our Operations Director and work closely with the Founder, brand team and regulatory partner.
What you'll bring- 5–7 years in product development for hard goods businesses who source and work with China, Vietnam, India and more (the homeware industry is highly favoured). Tech, software or marketing won't translate in this role.
- Supply chain and operations background; understanding the core principles for building high quality supply chains.
- Direct experience working with Chinese factories. You read between the lines of a yes and have navigated samples-go-wrong before.
- Multi-category breadth, not one SKU type on repeat.
- Hands-on with technical dossier inputs for regulatory submission.
- Fluent in Monday (or ClickUp/Asana/Notion) and Google Workspace. You run the tracker, you don't just consume it.
- Demonstrable, current AI workflows you've built into your day-to-day.
- Strong written English — this role runs on async writing.
- Startup or small-to-mid-sized brand background. Comfortable with limited resources and high autonomy.
