Director of Sourcing

About the role

VeeFriends is an intellectual property company focusing on characters, storytelling, community, and collecting. We develop and produce products such as trading cards, comics, collectible coins, stickers, apparel, and other innovative items. We are seeking a Director of Sourcing to oversee the sourcing, manufacturing, costing, production, and quality aspects of our physical products.

Responsibilities

• Own global sourcing and manufacturing strategy across VeeFriends' product portfolio, including trading cards, comics, collectible coins, stickers, apparel, accessories, and future categories.
• Translate product concepts and specifications into executable manufacturing plans and identify the right processes, materials, suppliers, and geographies.
• Lead RFQs/RFPs, supplier selection, sampling, prototyping, production negotiations, and manufacturing awards.
• Build a resilient supplier network with alternative and backup manufacturers while evaluating opportunities for nearshoring, dual sourcing, supplier consolidation, and other strategies that improve economics and resiliency.
• Develop sourcing capabilities to support expansion into entirely new consumer-product categories.
• Serve as the primary sourcing and manufacturing partner to Product Development and Creative, bringing manufacturing expertise into the development process early enough to influence materials, construction, specifications, packaging, and cost.
• Help teams balance creative ambition, manufacturability, cost, quality, and timing.
• Own accurate product costing throughout the development and manufacturing lifecycle and ensure product economics support target gross margins.
• Identify opportunities for value engineering without diminishing perceived quality or collectible appeal.
• Track purchase-price variance and measurable sourcing savings.
• Build scalable sourcing and manufacturing processes across RFQs, vendor onboarding, costing, purchase orders, sampling, approvals, quality control, and production tracking.
• Maintain accurate supplier, product, costing, specification, and production documentation.
• Establish dashboards and KPIs around supplier performance, COGS, savings, lead times, on-time production, defect rates, and quality.
• Create processes to protect against unauthorized overruns, leakage, substitution, duplication, and premature disclosure of sensitive products.
• Lead root-cause analysis and corrective actions when defects or quality failures occur and establish standards for supplier remediation, rework, credits, or replacement.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of progressive experience in sourcing, manufacturing, product development, procurement, or supply chain, ideally within consumer products.
• Significant experience managing domestic and international manufacturers and suppliers.
• Demonstrated success negotiating manufacturing costs and commercial terms and delivering measurable COGS improvements.
• Deep understanding of product development and manufacturing from concept through finished goods.
• Strong experience with supplier qualification, factory evaluation, quality assurance, inspection, and corrective-action programs.
• Experience managing multiple concurrent production programs with aggressive launch timelines.
• Strong understanding of manufacturing economics, MOQs, tooling, capacity planning, payment terms, and production lead times.
• Experience sourcing across multiple product categories strongly preferred.
• Experience in collectibles, trading cards, toys, games, publishing, premium print, promotional products, or adjacent categories is highly valuable.
• Familiarity with collectible quality standards, grading considerations, limited-edition manufacturing, serialization, randomized products, or mystery/chase mechanics is a major plus.
• Experience in an entrepreneurial, high-growth, or founder-led consumer business strongly preferred.
• Comfortable traveling domestically and internationally as needed.

Pay

The pay range for this role is $140,000 - $190,000 USD per year (VeeFriends Main Work Location).