Mitch Mann

Product Development: Designed, sourced, and merchandised a variety of private label apparel and accessory projects with a focus toward the action sports, music licensing, and fashion brands, and licensed entertainment industries. Duties include direct factory negotiation, pricing, factory audits, product testing, and design.

Product Expertise: Consumer product development including baseball caps, fashion headwear, knit accessories, casual apparel, organic apparel, outerwear, bags, phone cases, towels, toys, athletic accessories, sunglasses, glassware, bicycle accessories, wallets, socks, footwear, home goods, computer accessories, web design, and sustainable packaging.

Sales: Handled all sales to licensed product accounts including larger retail chains from mass to speciality. Designed all retail presentations to include audio-visual presentations and showroom presentations. Directly involved with order details including pricing, margin control, and overall attention to quality and detail. Traveled to a variety of corporate vendor meetings, and was the point person for product pitches to some of the companies largest customers.

Awards: Awarded ‘Employee of the Year’ for two consectutive years.

Product/Brand Development: Conceived original designs for headwear, bags, towels, footwear, jackets, wallets, bandanas, ice chests, and many other seasonal accessories. Sourcing and Factory Interaction: Sourced raw materials, applications, prints, molds, and fabrications overseas. Traveled to factories and open fabric markets overseas on a bi-yearly basis to establish criteria for factories to follow for certain accounts or product lines. Handled all factory audits for compliance.

Account Management: Worked closely with developing exclusive custom branded programs for a variety of cliental. Worked with many industry leaders such as: Fashion retailers (Aeropostale, American Eagle, Abercrombie), Action sports (Yamaha, Descente Ski, Body Glove, and several other channels of distribution. Ability to present and interpret a variety of tech packs from concept to prototype stage.

Sales, Marketing and Licensing: Key company representative for the entire licensed product programs. This included negotiating contracts in areas that include: Entertainment licensing, (Spiderman, Survivor, Lord of the Rings, Pokemon, Godzilla, Southpark, Peanuts, The Simpsons, and Looney Tunes), Sports licensing (NASCAR, NCAA, 1996-2008 Olympics), Brand licensing (Chevrolet, Skechers, Budweiser, and Corona) and Cross-licenses (Looney Tunes/NHL/NCAA).

Sales Management and Art Direction: Directly managed a sales staff as large as 144 independent sales representatives, 6 product managers, 4 merchandisers, and an in house art design staff of 6 as well as several freelance artists. Coordinated and presented all company pitches for major retail account and all major studio pitches.

Market and Visual Enhancement: Complete implementation of sales, marketing and media plans. Designed complete package of P.O.P, print and trade advertising, press releases, and two internet web sites (www.kcheadwear.com and www.headstartcaps.com) including copywriting and content.

Retail Merchandising Design: Organized and directed the site search, lease negotiations, store staffing, and construction (including lighting, audio visual, and security systems), architect/corporate/contractors interactions, and purchasing of merchandise material for several corporate 'concept stores' in three different retail environments. Achieved an effective opening of new stores within budget. The stores had ground breaking display and visual techniques used throughout.

Product Development and Promotions: Supervised the group that produced the first ‘active-outdoor’ product concept. Activities included sourcing of organic and recycled materials, POP development, copy writing, brainstorming, in-house footwear and apparel product development, vendor relationships, trend forecasting, marketing campaigns, and retail launches.

Merchandising: Designed marketing materials, press releases, advertising campaigns, frame designs, and pricing structures for new product lines including copywriting and content. Supplied a sales force of 150 with product materials, new product launches, samples, and RX frame designs. The result was an intergrated program that supplied the sales force with trending samples in advance of market weeks and trade shows. Sourced frame designs in Europe, working directly with National Sales Director to stimulate national accounts. Company contact for all PR and sponsorships with key endorsement relationships.

Sales and Promotions: Created and maintained an innovative sales force newsletter. Result: Sales Representatives became rejuvenated because of dispersal of relevant information not previously available. Developed new product plan for marketing of sport sunglasses with a fashion emphasis. Directly involved in negotiating several endorsement programs. Result: 15% increase in those sales channels.