Wine Operations Manager

Maker is a premium canned wine company serving up award-winning wine from the nation's best small producers, in the perfect single-serving pour. 

We're a small-but-mighty female-founded business shaking up the wine world and lifting up the little guys. We are storytellers, curators, and experience-makers. We want to fix a broken system that adversely impacts small producers and make premium wine approachable to everyone. 

Featured in Wine Spectator, Vinepair, Forbes, and Food 52, we're the highest rated canned wine on the market today. We're venture-backed, growing fast, and just getting started. Join us!

We are looking for a polished, professional Operations Leader to work alongside Maker's COO, managing and supporting the entire Operations vertical as well as our incredible winery partners.  The ultimate goal is to ensure minimized costs, maximized efficiencies and a beautiful finished product that meets our strict quality standards.  This position will report directly to the COO and will be Full-Time / Partially Remote. 

To date, we've canned over 50 vintages and 20 varietals sourced from more than 15 different winery partners.  We started on mobile canning lines only, and now we're leveraging  in-house, high-speed canning lines as well.  One year ago, after owning fulfillment for the first 2.5 years of business, we outsourced everything to best-in-class, third-party fulfillment center Wineshipping.  Today we ship direct-to-consumer to thousands of Can Club members across the country, as well as direct-to-trade to ~125 retailer partners along the West Coast.  

We're looking for a superstar  - with great interpersonal awareness, great written and verbal communication skills, and a love for project management and teamwork - to manage Maker's entire supply chain, beginning with wine sourcing.  A technical background in wine is preferred, and a muscle in Ops and analytics is a plus.  Be ready to roll up your sleeves - the sky's the limit!

What you'll do:

• Assist in sourcing and vetting new winery partners (and their wines) through industry research, networking, and facilitating sampling with our customer and professional tasting panels, as well as with the executive team
• Manage external and internal meetings around production needs,  varietals, gallonage, pricing - and assist in  executing all contracts with our winery partners
• Be a friend, partner, and advisor to our winery partners, guiding them through the sourcing, to wine-finishing, to production process as the subject matter expert in the space
• Oversee the wine production pipeline and manage production days on-site at our winery partners and canning locations
• Manage Maker's supply chain and logistics partners, both upstream and downstream of production, e.g. transport vendors, can and label manufacturers, packaging vendors, canning facilities, commercial printers of collateral, merchandise vendors, food-pairing suppliers, etc.; manage accounts payable for the supply chain
• Manage the relationship with  our primary 3PL (third-party-logistics) fulfillment partner: Wineshipping
• Monitor inventory levels and allocations across our Direct-to-Consumer and Wholesale channels; communicate  across the entire Maker team to ensure full transparency
• Develop and monitor Ops KPIs (e.g. stats around production runs, movements, inventories, fulfillment times, delivery times, etc.) and report out in Team Meeting bi-weekly
• Drive closed feedback loop between Ops / Fulfillment / Sales / Marketing

Who you are:

• 2+ years of experience in operations, preferably with a food and beverage ecommerce business
• A technical background in wine is a plus
• You're a  high-energy self-starter, love a fast-paced startup environment, and are not afraid to roll up your sleeves and get things done
• Ability to deal with ambiguity, and apply scope and structure to a task
• Strong interpersonal awareness, strong verbal and written communication skills
• Great team player with leadership experience
• Great project manager
• Experience with Microsoft Word, Excel, and GSuite; Quickbooks and Bill.com are a plus!
• Associate's or Bachelor's degree from an accredited university; wine education is a plus!

Maker is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We not only embrace difference, we celebrate and value the diversity of our team members, our winemakers and our communities.