Vice President, Operations Apply Now

Vice President, Operations

Indianapolis, IN | Homefield

About the Role

Homefield is hiring its first Vice President of Operations to own the company's Operations division end to end: how product is planned, positioned, fulfilled, and delivered into a fan's hands in a manner that sparks joy for the fan and makes them a customer for life. 

This is a build role, not a caretaker role. This role will inherit a functioning operation with a four-partner 3PL network, an inventory function, and a growing retail footprint. This role will be responsible for turning it into a system that scales. Today, most operational decisions are owned across a committee of individuals: the CEO, the President, the Chief of Staff, the Head of Product, and the Inventory Manager. The purpose of this hire is to make sure there is one ultimate owner for all of Operations. This role will have considerable autonomy to design the processes, make the calls, and build the team to accomplish this. 

Homefield has built a brand that fans genuinely love, and the next chapter is building an operation worthy of it. We need to turn a thoughtfully designed product into a package on a doorstep faster and more efficiently than anyone else in collegiate apparel. That work is unowned today. It is the single biggest lever on both our customer experience and our margin, and it is this role’s to build. 

Job Responsibilities

This role owns the end-to-end flow of inventory and orders: demand and production planning, inventory strategy and allocation, the 3PL and freight network, the operational side of our delivery promise, store fulfillment, and hot market response.

Team, Systems & Operating Rhythm 

• Build, hire, structure, and develop the Operations organization across responsibilities below. Note that the areas below are owned by the Operations department, not necessarily by this role directly. This person will be able to build the team to execute their high-level decisions across the below Responsibilities.
• Establish the metrics, reporting, and operating cadence that let the business see itself clearly.
• Take day-to-day operational decision-making off the C Suite's desk.

Fulfillment & 3PL Network

• Own the relationships, commercial terms, and performance of Homefield's fulfillment partner network, spanning finished goods, wholesale, print-on-demand e-commerce, and embroidery-on-demand. 
• Define, instrument, and enforce SLAs. Build the reporting and review cadence that makes partner performance visible and accountability non-negotiable. 
• Negotiate contracts and rate structures; drive cost-to-serve down as volume grows. 
• Deliver a consistent fulfillment experience across every node, so a fan's experience never depends on which partner happens to ship their order.
• Build surge readiness. When we drop a collection into a live moment, orders should ship within 48 hours. 

Inventory Strategy, Planning & Allocation 

• Lead the inventory, buying and product-setup function, and grow that team as scope expands. 
• Stand up a genuine demand planning process — forecast, review cadence, ownership — and ensure it is executed, not just documented. 
• Set in-stock and weeks-of-supply targets that reflect an aggressive growth plan bolstered by a strong cash position. 
• Allocate inventory across fulfillment nodes and retail stores to minimize storage and fulfillment cost, and to shift volume from higher-cost print-on-demand toward lower-cost, higher-quality screen print wherever demand supports it. 
• Own production and volume planning: what quantities we commit to, on what timeline, and against what capacity. 
• Own pre-print strategy: which schools, which products, what depth, positioned where, so hot inventory is on a shelf before it is in demand. 

Freight & Transportation

• Own freight and LTL carrier relationships, rate negotiation, and service performance. 
• Partner with the product team to build inbound ordering processes that design expedited air freight out of the system rather than reacting to it. 
• Manage landed cost as a deliberate, tracked number rather than a residual. 

Delivery Promise & Order Experience 

• Own order routing logic to reduce split shipments, protect margin, and shorten transit times. 
• Make made-to-order versus in-stock legible to the customer on-site, and reflect it in an accurate delivery promise at checkout. 
• Introduce differentiated shipping options so a fan who needs a shirt by Saturday can buy that certainty, and we can honor it. 
• Partner with web and technology teams to specify and prioritize the systems work this requires, and with customer service to close the loop when the promise slips. 

Store Fulfillment: Ship-from-Store & Buy Online Pick Up in Store (BOPIS) 

• Build Homefield's ship-from-store program from the ground up, designed for a footprint scaling from one store toward thirty. 
• Define what "store as fulfillment node" means at our scale: back-of-house footprint, warehouse and WMS requirements, inventory positioning, and pick/pack standards. Design in partnership with Retail leadership, who own store teams, assortment and store performance. 
• Position school-specific inventory in the stores that sell it, reducing 3PL storage and fulfillment cost and shifting volume toward lower-cost production. 
• Improve BOPIS across accuracy, speed, and the in-store customer handoff. 

Hot Market Execution

• Partner with Product and Marketing to define which moments Homefield responds to, and build the playbook that lets us respond in hours.
• Ensure owned stores and retail partners can have championship and hot market product in-hand day-of or next-day.
• Pre-negotiate the capacity, blanks position, and partner readiness that make speed possible before the moment arrives.

Key Competencies

Required

• 8+ years in operations, supply chain, or fulfillment leadership, with meaningful time in a direct-to-consumer e-commerce environment. Apparel, licensed product, or consumer goods strongly preferred.
• Hands-on 3PL ownership: partner selection, contracting, rate negotiation, SLA design, and the willingness to hold partners to them.
• Demand, production, and multi-node inventory planning experience: you have built a planning function, not just consumed its output, and you can set service-level targets.
• A track record of building, not just running: A process, a program, a partner network, or a team that did not exist before you arrived.
• Comfort with ambiguity and speed in a founder-led company where the answer often is not written down yet.

Preferred

• Omnichannel fulfillment experience: standing up ship-from-store, BOPIS, or store-as-node models in a scaling retail footprint.
• Exposure to print-on-demand, screen printing, decoration, or made-to-order production economics.
• Experience in a demand environment with sharp, unpredictable spikes: sports, entertainment, product drops, or acute seasonality.
• A real interest in college sports. Not a requirement, but the people who thrive here understand why a fan needs that shirt by Saturday.

What Makes You a Good Fit

• You make things happen, and consider yourself to be a self-starter.
• You are relentlessly efficient and detail-oriented.
• You think critically and use data to make informed decisions.
• You can hold partners accountable.
• You are a problem-solver, particularly when no one is handing you an answer.
• You can stay calm in fast-paced and changing environments.

How Success Will be Measured

• Ultimately: Fan satisfaction with the shipping and delivery experience.
• Order-to-ship time: for collection drops and hot market moments across DTC, Wholesale, Amazon and In-Store.
• Split shipment rate: the lower, the better
• In-stock rate and weeks of supply against target; inventory turns
• 3PL SLA attainment across the partner network
• Margin improvements by shifting fulfillment from 3PL to stores, picking the right shirts to pre-print vs. print-on-demand
• Cost to fulfill per order
• Delivery promise accuracy: did we get it there when we said we would?
• Ship-from-store and BOPIS throughput and accuracy as the footprint scales

Benefits

• 4-day Work Week (unless event travel is needed)
• Health Insurance (Dental and Vision Included)
• FSA
• 401(k) Program
• Unlimited PTO
• Annual Performance Reviews with Associated Merit Raises 
• Fully Paid Parental Leave
• Sick Leave
• Generous Employee Discount