Trade Marketing Director

Director Of Trade Marketing – U.S.

ZURU is on a mission to disrupt industries and challenge the status quo through innovation and automation. Our brands reflect this vision: ZURU Toys re-imagines play, ZURU Tech leads the next building revolution, and ZURU Edge creates modern CPG brands for today's consumers.

Founded in 2003 by EY Entrepreneur of the Year brothers Nick and Mat Mowbray, ZURU has grown to over 5,000 team members across 30+ international locations.

As one of the world's largest toy companies, our award-winning brands include Bunch O Balloons, Mini Brands, XSHOT, Rainbocorns, and Smashers. Our CPG portfolio features MONDAY Haircare, Rascals, NOOD, BONKERS, Gumi Yum Surprise, and more.

Position Overview:

We are looking for an exceptional Director of Trade Marketing – U.S. to help define and elevate how ZURU goes to market. This is a highly influential commercial leadership role responsible for establishing the strategy, frameworks, operating disciplines, and standards that underpin our U.S. sales organization. The Director will own ZURU's 4P commercial framework across Presence, Price, Place and Promotion, while partnering closely with our Sales Directors to elevate forecasting, account strategy, commercial planning, and execution. This person will not directly own retailer relationships; instead, they will help ensure every Sales Director and account team has the strategy, tools, insights, and operating discipline required to win. The mandate is simple: build the commercial operating system that enables ZURU to become the best sales organization in the U.S. toy industry.

Position Impact:

ZURU is one of the largest and fastest-growing toy companies globally, driven by a relentless focus on innovation, disruption, and execution. As our U.S. Toys business continues to scale, we are building the commercial capabilities required to move from being a high-growth supplier to becoming a true category leader across the U.S. market. Success in this role will mean ZURU has a clearly defined and consistently executed commercial operating model across the U.S. — with stronger forecasting discipline, sharper category and retailer strategies, and every major account backed by a robust, insight-led 4P strategy. This role will help ZURU further establish itself as a best-in class commercial organization, capable of consistently driving category growth and winning with the largest retailers in the U.S.

Roles & Responsibilities:

Own the U.S. 4P Strategy & Commercial Framework:

• Own and continuously elevate ZURU's U.S. 4P strategy across Presence, Price, Place and Promotion, establishing a consistent commercial standard across every retailer and channel.
• Develop the frameworks, tools, scorecards, and governance required to translate the 4Ps from principles to measurable execution.
• Partners with Sales Directors to develop channel-specific, category-centric 4P strategies that reflect each channel's shopper, category strategy, competitive environment, and commercial opportunity.
• Establish clear standards for assortment architecture, pricing and price ladders, promotional strategy, placement, merchandising, distribution, exclusivity, and new-product launches.
• Create a regular review cadence to assess performance against 4P standards, identify gaps, and drive corrective action.
• Act as the guardian of commercial excellence, challenging teams where plans or execution fall below the required standard

Sales Strategy & Commercial Planning:

• Partner with U.S. Sales Directors to build robust annual, seasonal, and account-level sales strategies.
• Translate ZURU's company and category ambitions into clear retailer growth strategies, priorities, and commercial plans.
• Establish frameworks for account planning that clearly articulate where we will play, how we will win, and what must be true to deliver the plan.
• Challenge Sales Directors to ensure their strategies are insight-led, commercially sound, ambitious, and executable.
• Connect retailer strategies across channels to ensure ZURU is making deliberate choices around assortment, exclusivity, pricing, promotional activity, launches, and distribution.
• Help identify whitespace opportunities and the biggest commercial levers capable of shifting the needle across the U.S. business.

Forecasting Discipline & Business Planning:

• Partner with Sales Directors, Commercial, and Finance to establish world-class forecasting discipline across the U.S. organization.
• Build standardized forecasting frameworks, processes, assumptions, and review cadences across retailers and channels.
• Drive accountability around forecast accuracy and ensure teams can clearly articulate the assumptions, opportunities, and risks underpinning their forecasts.
• Create stronger connectivity between POS performance, inventory, distribution, promotional plans, new launches, retailer commitments, and revenue forecasts.
• Challenge both upside and downside assumptions, ensuring forecasts represent the team's best commercial view rather than simply a financial target.
• Identify forecast risks early and work with Sales Directors to establish clear mitigation or acceleration plans.

Build the ZURU Sales Operating System:

• Codify ZURU's Ideal Sales Vision and translate it to practical standards for how our commercial teams operate.
• Develop scalable frameworks covering account strategy, 4P planning, forecasting, business reviews, new-item launches, promotional planning, retailer negotiations, and performance management.
• Create best-in-class templates and tools that improve both the quality and consistency of commercial thinking across the organization.
• Establish clear KPIs and scorecards to measure execution against our commercial standards.
• Reduce unnecessary complexity while ensuring teams have the processes and disciplines required to manage an increasingly large and sophisticated business.
• Continuously identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness, speed, and quality of decision-making across Sales.

Category Analytics & Insights:

• Turn data into clear commercial actions, partnering with Sales, Commercial, Category Management, and Analytics to ensure retailer strategies are grounded in fact-based, category-first insights.
• Develop scorecards that measure performance across the 4Ps and clearly identify gaps and opportunities.
• Ensure teams understand not simply what happened, but why it happened and what we are going to do about it.
• Use retailer, category, shopper, competitive, and internal data to identify opportunities to grow ZURU brands and the categories in which we compete.
• Help elevate business reviews from performance reporting into strategic, insight-led conversations with our retail partners.

Sales Leadership Partnership & Capability Building:

• Act as a strategic thought partner to the U.S. Sales Directors while maintaining the independence to challenge plans and execution where required.
• Coach teams on commercial thinking, category storytelling, account strategy, forecasting, 4P planning, and data-led decision-making.
• Identify capability gaps across the organization and develop frameworks, training, and tools to close them.
• Create mechanisms for sharing best practices across retailers that winning category strategies are rapidly replicated across the U.S. business.
• Raise the commercial standard of the entire organization — not by doing the Sales Directors' jobs for them, but by enabling and holding them accountable to consistently exceptional standards.

Skills & Experience:

• 8–12+ years of experience across Trade Marketing, Sales Strategy, Commercial Strategy, Category Management, Revenue Growth Management, Sales Operations, or related commercial leadership roles.
• Significant experience within CPG, Toys, Consumer Products, or another high-velocity retail environment.
• Strong understanding of major U.S. retail and the commercial levers required to win across mass, club, ecommerce, value, grocery, drug, and other channels.
• Deep understanding of the 4Ps: Presence, Price, Place and Promotion.
• Demonstrated experience building commercial frameworks and embedding them across Sales organizations.
• Strong forecasting, financial, analytical, and business-planning capabilities.
• Experience translating POS, inventory, distribution, pricing, promotional, and market data into commercial decisions.
• Proven ability to influence and challenge senior stakeholders without relying on direct reporting authority.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills with the ability to simplify complex commercial problems.
• Highly accountable, action-oriented, and comfortable operating in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment.
• Strong bias toward continuous improvement and raising organizational standards.
• Commercially minded leader who combines strategic thinking with an obsession for execution — equally comfortable building a framework, interrogating a forecast, or working through the details of a retailer's promotional plan.