Senior Technical Apparel Designer

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Fashion Design & Creative Direction

• Leads the creative design vision for performance apparel, ensuring products reflect brand identity, aesthetic direction, and consumer appeal while maintaining functional intent.
• Applies strong fashion design principles, including silhouette, color, trend, and storytelling to create innovative, commercially compelling products.
• Leads the design and cosmetic development of performance apparel from concept through production.

Concept Development

• Partners cross‑functionally on innovation, product concepts, and launches to drive brand and commercial results.
• Executes product development initiatives, and translates brand vision, consumer insights, and performance requirements into innovative apparel concepts that balance style and performance.

Technical Design Execution

• Develops detailed technical and cosmetic design specifications, including materials, construction, fit, trims, colorways, and artwork placement to support design intent. Creates and maintains tech packs, CADs, sketches, BOMs, and size specifications to clearly communicate intent to manufacturers.

Costs and Production Planning

• Estimates production costs, identifies cost saving methods, and makes design decisions with a clear understanding of their impact on manufacturing cost and required investments.

Competitiveness Analysis

• Analyzes/researches competitor products, fashion trends, and leading practices to provide recommendations on new design direction, materials, finishing, assembly, size/weight and performance.

Vendor and External Partner Management

• Manages relationships with external vendors and partners to ensure targets, timelines and quality are achieved. Provides direction to vendors in prototype manufacturing, runs vendor inspections to streamline production processes and maintain expenses.

Engineering and Product Quality

• Partners closely with internal teams on technical processes and testing to ensure products align with design intent, specifications, timelines, and budgets while meeting quality/compliance requirements. Reviews prototypes, samples, pre-production units and provides test feedback.

Continuous Improvement

• Uses consumer feedback and performance insights to improve designs, address technical issues, and enhance efficiency and market impact.

Other

• Performs other duties as assigned.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS

Education: Bachelor’s degree in fashion design, apparel design, industrial design or equivalent.

Experience: Typically requires 5 years of experience designing performance apparel, preferably outdoor which includes leading end-to-end design and cosmetic development , developing detailed technical specifications and partnering cross-functionally to deliver high-quality, market-completive products.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES

• Strong foundation in fashion design principles (silhouette, color, materials, and trend application) combined with an understanding of performance apparel design, construction methods, and fit.
• Ability to translate consumer insights and market trends into commercially successful product designs, balancing aesthetics with functional requirements.
• Hands‑on experience creating technical specifications and working directly with domestic and/or overseas manufacturing partners. Ability to balance fashion trends with technical performance and manufacturability.
• Experience operating as an autonomous individual contributor with ownership for design decisions.
• Proficiency in design and technical tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, PLM systems, and CAD software.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to collaborate effectively with diverse individuals and effectively present to multiple teams, and to clearly convey design intent and specifications to manufacturers.
• Excellent cross‑functional collaboration skills with the ability to influence without direct authority.
• Demonstrated experience managing multiple concurrent product development projects on schedule, within budget, and to defined quality standards.
• Detail‑oriented with a strong commitment to product quality and consistency.
• Skills and proven success in executing product development plans and strategies to support the development of innovative and profitable products.Understanding of product margins/financials and significant analytical ability.