Contract Product Calendar Architect

Pact; United States; Hybrid; USD 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Travel covered

Job summary

Pact is seeking an experienced calendar program lead to design and implement two parallel timelines for fashion product development.

The role requires coordinating across Design, Development, Materials, Merchandising, Planning, Sourcing, and Wholesale, and delivering a realistic baseline calendar with two new paths Phase 1 runs ~12 weeks with onsite time in Boulder and travel covered; you will interview teams, map current rules, and define ownership for each milestone.

Qualifications

• 8+ years running calendars and cross-team process in apparel, footwear, or consumer products.
• Experience building fast/chase calendars at companies with existing traditional calendars.
• Ability to push back on exceptions from leadership while remaining welcome in discussions.
• Knowledge of product development, design, materials, sourcing, planning, and wholesale timing.
• Strong attention to days, rules, and dependencies in a complex timeline.
• Ability to build capacity models from messy data and explain assumptions.

Responsibilities

• Interview teams across Design, Development, Materials, Merchandising, Planning, Sourcing, and Wholesale to baseline how the calendar works.
• Map the current timeline against reality and identify real vs habitual rules.
• Assess how many styles can be developed per season and align with Design and Materials.
• Create week-by-week workback calendars showing overloads and the impact of two new paths.
• Design the fast path with checkpoints, owners, and shortest viable timeline.
• Design the long path including fit rounds, material development, and vendor commitments.
• Build a mechanism to fill open slots with clear signals, owners, and response times.
• Coordinate with Wholesale to align booked windows and trade show dates.
• Develop calendars with Design and Merchandising so handoffs are owned and tracked.
• Prepare handoff so there is an owner for every checkpoint and a calendar that lasts beyond the project.

Skills

Calendars & cross-team process

Apparel knowledge

Wholesale experience

Vendor coordination

Stakeholder management

Attention to details

Job description

Pact | 6 month project | Reports to the Chief Product Officer

Remote, with time onsite in Boulder during the first phase. You tell us how much and when. Travel covered. You need to work Mountain Time hours.

Why we need this

Pact has one product calendar. Every style, whether it is a tee or a bra, moves through the same 30 steps on the same timeline. Four seasons a year. Product hits the site 180 days after we release the purchase order.

One timeline for everything is the problem. Some products should move much faster. Some need more time. Right now neither is possible.

We need two more paths, and someone to build them.

The fast path

We want to leave open slots in the seasonal line plan and fill them when we spot something the market wants. Not reorders. Not new colors of things we already make. New product, developed quickly, based on something we learned after the season was planned.

We already try to do this. Our Collection Review Fitting agenda has a line about aligning on chase product. But that meeting happens after all the tech packs are out, about nine months before the product goes live. The fabric is already bought. The slot is already gone. So chase is something we talk about, not something we can actually do.

Three things have to work for a fast path to be real:

• A much shorter development process.
• Discipline to keep the open slots open instead of filling them early.
• Vendors who can hit the shorter timeline.

You partner with our sourcing team to figure out which vendors can support this and what they need from us.

The long path, for bras and technical product

Bras need more fit rounds, longer material development, and more back and forth with vendors than our standard timeline allows. Today they run on a timeline built for simpler product. That shows up as fit problems and rushed decisions.

This path runs longer than the standard one and starts earlier.

Both new paths run next to the current calendar. They do not replace it.

What you will do Phase 1: figure it out and build it (about 12 weeks)

Start by talking to people. Interview the team across Design, Development, Materials, Merchandising, Planning, Sourcing, and Wholesale. Find out how the calendar actually works, not how it is written down. That is your baseline. Everything else builds on it.

Then:

• Check the current timeline against reality. Every step has a rule behind its date, like "14 days from sketch review." Find out which rules are real and which are just habit.
• Find out how many styles we can actually handle. How many styles can Development get through in one season, at the quality we want, with the team we have? Nobody knows this number today. Build it from real history. Then check Design and Materials too, because the real bottleneck might not be Development.
• Map when the work lands, week by week. Knowing we can handle 90 styles a season is not enough. The work does not arrive evenly, and four seasons overlap. Design already has weeks with seven things running at once across four seasons. Show us which weeks are overloaded, and what the two new paths would add to them.
• Design the fast path. Who can use it, what the checkpoints are, who decides, and the shortest timeline that still makes good product.
• Design the long path. Fit round schedule, how much runway material development needs, and what we need vendors to commit to.
• Build the mechanism for filling open slots. What signal triggers a call, who makes it, how fast that decision has to happen, and how product moves once we say go. Merchandising and Planning decide how many slots we hold and what goes in them. Slots come out of our total style capacity, not on top of it. A slot we cannot develop is not a slot.
• Get Wholesale on the calendar. Wholesale has one step on our timeline today, and it only has dates for two of four seasons. Wholesale runs on booking windows and trade show dates we do not control. Get those dated and lined up with product, and tell us where they conflict.
• Build workback calendars with Design and Merchandising. Those two carry the most steps. The master timeline says when something is due. It does not say what a team needs to start eight weeks earlier to hit it. Build these sitting next to the lead, not on your own, so the calendar belongs to them. Other teams get one only if your work says they need it.
• Tell us where it hurts. Where does the calendar fight itself? Which weeks pile up? Which dates contradict their own rules? We would rather hear it early and blunt than late and polite.

Phase 2: prove it and hand it off

A full season takes longer than this contract, so the two paths get tested differently.

• Fast path: run one real chase start to finish. If the path works, a chase finishes inside 12 weeks. That is the whole point of it, and it is the only real test. You take a live opportunity, run product through the short process with a vendor who has agreed to it, and we find out what breaks. You leave knowing whether it works.
• Long path: start it and set up tracking. A bra cannot be developed inside this contract. Start a real category on the new timeline, get it through material development and the first fit round, and set up tracking so the team can see whether the rest holds after you go.
• Hold the checkpoints. Write down every exception and why it happened. You are not in fittings and you are not judging product. You are tracking whether the checkpoint held, whether feedback went out on time, and whether the decision got made.
• Hand it over. A documented calendar with a named owner on every step, and workback calendars that Design and Merchandising own.

One thing to know about the handoff

Nobody replaces you. When you leave, each team's leads own their own checkpoints, and the Chief Product Officer only handles escalations. Build for that from day one. If your system needs a full time person to survive, it is the wrong system.

Who we are looking for

• 8 or more years running calendars and cross team process in apparel, footwear, or consumer products.
• You have built a fast or chase calendar before, at a company that already had a traditional one. You know why they usually fail, and you know it is usually vendors or slot discipline, not the calendar itself.
• You can tell a Vice President no when they want an exception, and still be welcome in the room.
• You know how product development, design, materials, sourcing, and planning work. You do not need to be a technical designer, but you need to hold your own in a conversation about timelines with one.
• You are good at details. Working days versus calendar days, date rules, and what depends on what. That is the job.
• You can build a capacity model from messy data and explain your assumptions. There is no clean data set waiting for you here.
• You can get people to actually use what you build. A calendar nobody follows is not a calendar.
• You build things that last after you leave.
• You have built workback calendars with a team lead, not for them. It is a real difference and it shows up six months later.
• Wholesale experience helps. Booking windows and trade show dates are set by other people and they do not move for us.

Bra or intimates experience is a plus, not a requirement.

The contract

• Two phases. We decide on Phase 2 after Phase 1.
• Fixed fee per phase. Compensation to be confirmed.
• Travel to Boulder covered separately.
• Reports to the Chief Product Officer. That backing will be visible to the company, and you will have the standing to pull together Design, Development, Materials, Sourcing, Planning, Merchandising, and Wholesale.

Tell us in your proposal how much onsite time Phase 1 needs and when you want it.