A pair of court shoes leaves a factory in China, clears customs, sits in a US 3PL, and eventually lands on a court in Phoenix. Between those points, there are a lot of places for things to go wrong.

A size sells out and nobody notices until it's too late. A support ticket sits unanswered. An exchange becomes a refund then a chargeback. A payout gets stuck somewhere in the middle.

There is no one connecting all of those dots. That's the gap this hire will fill. You'll be the first person responsible for making the entire customer and operations journey work as one system, from factory to front door and everything in between.

WHO THEY ARE

A DTC footwear brand building court shoes around the way people actually move. They sell through Shopify to players who are on court several times a week, and they stand behind the product with 100-day free exchanges and a six-month warranty.

The team is small, remote and founder-led. There are no layers between a good idea and getting it done, and no shortage of problems worth solving.

Founders stay close to the customer and the day-to-day
Curiosity and good judgment matter more than credentials
Small changes can have a visible impact within weeks
Remote by default, with a strong focus on what gets done

This is a fully remote, full-time role.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU

The founders are your only stakeholders. You pitch them directly, and decisions land the same week.
COO is the next rung. Stated plainly by the founders. Build the function well and you run it.
A blank sheet. The stack today is Slack, Asana and Google Drive. Every other tool, process and vendor is your call.
Bonuses you help design. Structure gets agreed with you, tied to the problems you are actually solving.
Nobody counts your hours. Fully remote, no fixed schedule.
Proper benefits underneath it. Vacation allowance, travel allowance, training, and paid leave when health needs it.

WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO

Take support from a founder-run backlog to a system that answers fast. AI on the repeats, humans on the rest.
Find out why shoes come back. Sizing, fit, expectations, damage in transit: pick the causes apart and kill them one at a time.
Turn returns into a reason to buy again. The 100-day exchange promise is only worth what the experience behind it feels like.
Forecast stock properly. Sizes sell in curves, not averages, and the popular ones should never be the ones out of stock.
Run the 3PL relationship between China and the US. Set the timelines, hold them to it, and know where a shipment is before anyone asks.
Make payouts and the payment stack boring. Money in, money out, nothing stuck, no surprises at month end.
Route customer complaints to the people who can change the product. The same complaint twice is data. The same complaint fifty times is a design brief.
Build the hiring and onboarding process from nothing. The next hire should be useful in week one, without a founder walking them through it.
Put numbers on everything and go hunting. Every percent of margin sitting in a bad process is yours to take back.

WHO YOU ARE

You have run operations for a DTC or ecommerce brand selling physical products, ideally at 8 or 9 figure scale.
You know the supply chain management in and out - from sourcing suppliers, to dealing with distributors and 3PL’s to inventory forecasting and planning.
You have worked in a business that was actively growing and know what changes when volume starts putting pressure on the operation.
You're comfortable working and overseeing Customer Support teams and you’re familiar with tools like Richpanel and Gorgias, and the systems around them.
You have stepped into a messy support operation, found what was broken, and put a better system in place.
You use AI and automation in your day-to-day work to reduce manual work
You understand the numbers behind operations and can spot where revenue, margin or time is being lost.

Bonus if you've:

Worked in footwear or fashion
Handled payment processors and gateways
Built reporting on top of Shopify
Automated support with AI without letting quality slip

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Day 30: You understand where orders, support, inventory and fulfillment are getting stuck. Response times, refunds and exchanges have clear numbers behind them, and founders are no longer the default escalation point.
Day 60: Support runs through your workflows, automation handles the repetitive volume, and the biggest refund drivers have fixes in place. Inventory has a clear forecast and reorder cadence.
Day 90: The founders are out of daily ops. Support, inventory and fulfillment have clear processes, key issues are tracked, and the operation can run without everything sitting in one person's head.