Head of Merch Programs

We produce products for three brands: Supply , for the people building on Shopify. Shopify Rebellion , for players and fans of our esport team. And Shopify Racing , for our team and fans on and off the track. The common thread: we build these brands on Shopify and produce delightful commerce experiences to turn fans into brand ambassadors. Merch is the only advertising people pay for and choose to wear, making it one of Shopify impactful brand opportunities. We're hiring a Head of Merch Programs to own the strategy and execution across the brands. This role reports to Shopify’s VP of Brand. The obvious version of this work is to source, design, produce, market and sell products that further the relationship Shopify has with its audiences. The goal is not to be a profitable retailer, it's to create commerce experiences in service of brand value, which means the decisions that matter most are the counterintuitive ones. What to make less of. What to give away rather than sell. What to never restock. Where to market. Which drop shouldn't happen at all. If your instinct is to optimize sell-through, this will be a frustrating role. If your instinct is to ask what would make people talk, it won't. You'll own merchandise strategy for Supply and Racing. For Esports, you’ll partner with the team on all major merchandising strategies and consult on high value opportunities for the org. This is a net-new role. There is no shared playbook, calendar, vendor base, quality bar, or agreed way of deciding what's worth making. Building that system is as much the job as any single drop. What you'll do Set the merchandise aim for Shopify’s branded commerce experiences. One coherent point of view across three brands with genuinely different jobs: functional products to get the job done (team kits, jerseys, gear) and fan products to celebrate the brand. Build the system, not just the seasons. Establish the drop calendar, brief standards, vendor base, quality bar, and decision framework for what earns a place in the assortment. Own Supply and Racing end to end. Strategy, assortment, go-to-market, and the story each drop tells. Shape how each one earns attention. Advise and interrogate Rebellion's aim. Bring a rigorous outside point of view to a program that already exists and already works. Make it better without owning it. Own the storefront aim. Partner with Brand Design Studio to build delightful commerce experiences that flex Shopify’s product and feature set. Create with taste and craft. Direct the decisions that determine whether product is desirable: materials, construction, fit, trims, graphics and printing, packaging, and overall quality. Get deep in the work. Drive alignment across the company. Merchandise touches brand, design, social, comms, finance, product, and multiple business owners. Build the relationships and the operating cadence that make launches worth noticing, buying and sharing. Read culture, and know when not to act. Stay close to merchant conversations, esports communities, and motorsport fandom. Spot the moments worth reacting to and hold a high bar on the ones that aren't ours. Direct a small dedicated pod plus embedded brand partners in each business who carry operational execution — sourcing, vendor management, production, and fulfillment coordination. Measure what matters. Orders, repeat buyers, sell-through, and earned social buzz — read alongside the brand signals that GMV alone won't show you. What we're looking for Founder-grade creative experience. You've built and sold physical product yourself, most likely as a founder or founding creative. You know what it takes because you've done it, not because you've managed it. Belief about what merch can be. You think a single product can out-earn the campaign it was made for; like a jacket that can generate more earned impressions vs paid. You have strong opinions about which brands understand this. Taste, demonstrably. A body of work you can point at and defend. We care more about what you've made than where you've worked. Cultural fluency with range. You can move between commerce, esports, and motorsport without sounding like a tourist in any of them. "Eternally online," with a high bar for brand fit and the restraint to sit moments out. Systems thinking. You've built the function, not just worked in it. You can hold a company-wide aim and a fit sample in the same week. Influence at senior altitude. You can advise a GM on a business they own and be genuinely useful. You lead through the strength of your reasoning and first principles. Production fluency. Credible with factories and vendors — costing, sampling, MOQs, lead times, QC — enough to make sharp tradeoffs and hold a quality bar. You'll have support to run it; you won't need to run it yourself. Brand-value math over profit math. Numerate and disciplined with a budget, and clear-eyed that the return shows up as earned impressions and the number of people wearing us in rooms we didn't pay to be in. This role probably isn't for you if your strongest work is planning assortments inside an established merchandising function. We need someone who can invent the thing. How to Apply No cover letter. No resume. Just some questions to answer. Badly formatted is fine. Long is fine. Safe is not. Start by visiting any of our current brand commerce experiences: Supply, Rebellion or Racing, then answer the questions listed after hitting the Apply Now button. The deal on our side. The rest of the process is conversations and your own work. Application Deadline is September 4 and everyone who applies hears back from us.