Director, Consumer Insights

Ashley Furniture is seeking a Director, Consumer Insights to build a modern insights capability that brings the voice of the consumer, retail customer, sales associate, and marketplace into the decisions that shape Ashley's products, experiences, and growth. This role will own the insights operating model, custom research roadmap, insights repository, and decision-ready synthesis across Ashley's priorities. It is expected to shape questions, prioritize learning opportunities, and drive adoption of insights across teams.

This is a builder role for someone who combines research rigor, scrappy resourcefulness, strong collaboration, and hands-on ownership of analysis, synthesis, and executive-ready storytelling. The right person is energized by creating practical ways of working where a mature insights function hasn't historically existed, finds credible ways to answer business questions with available resources and imperfect data, and is comfortable doing the work directly — analyzing data, building slides, pressure-testing findings — rather than depending on external partners.

Reporting to the VP of Product Marketing, the Director will partner across business units and functions; Tampa, FL is preferred, with openness to remote candidates who can travel as needed.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Establish Ashley's insights capability as a practical force in product, marketing, retail, and customer experience decisions, bringing a builder mindset to a function still taking shape.
• Design and manage learning plans and custom research initiatives, translating ambiguous business questions into clear research objectives, survey instruments, discussion guides, sample plans, analysis frameworks, and actionable readouts — with the quantitative rigor to make findings clear, defensible, and useful.
• Synthesize research data, customer feedback, business inputs, and supplier outputs to develop implications for decision-ready presentations, working scrappily and resourcefully to answer business questions even when data or resources are imperfect.
• Build relationships across functions by demonstrating the practical value and business impact of insights, connecting dots across business units, channels, and stakeholder groups as an enterprise collaborator.
• Own Ashley's insights repository and knowledge hub, including searchable findings, source materials, reusable learnings, and AI-enabled synthesis workflows .
• Create a disciplined intake and prioritization process for insights work, balancing stakeholder requests against business impact, decision timing, available resources, and the quality of existing evidence.
• Manage and develop one direct report, including coaching, prioritization, quality review, and stakeholder alignment.
• Turn complex research into sharp, memorable, commercially useful takeaways that move decisions forward, operating as an influential storyteller across audiences with varying levels of research fluency.

The responsibilities described above are not exhaustive. You may be asked, from time to time and as reasonably required by business needs, to perform other duties consistent with your skills and role, including work for or on behalf of our related entities. This job description does not constitute a contract of employment and may be modified at any time, subject to applicable law.

Skills and Qualifications

• 8+ years in consumer/customer insights, market research, UX research, strategy, product marketing, or customer experience; director-level experience preferred . Bachelor's degree preferred.
• Proven experience designing and executing custom research (surveys, panels, concept testing, feedback programs, qualitative and quantitative methods) and synthesizing multi-source data into insight storytelling.
• Ability to connect consumer, customer, retail, and marketplace signals to product strategy, merchandising, pricing, and growth priorities — communicated through concise, commercially grounded executive recommendations.
• Fluency with AI-enabled research and knowledge management tools , used to accelerate synthesis without outsourcing judgment.
• Comfortable operating with incomplete inputs and limited resources while maintaining research discipline.
• Strong track record influencing across a matrixed organization with varying levels of research fluency.
• People management experience, with a high-ownership mindset suited to building an insights function from an early stage.
• Able and willing to travel to company on-site meetings in Tampa, FL

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in furniture, home goods, appliances, or other high-consideration retail/ecommerce categories.
• History of sourcing insights across store teams, customer service, reviews, marketplace content, and digital performance signals.
• Experience building an insights or knowledge management capability where adoption is still developing.

What We Offer

• Competitive Salary
• Health, Vision & Dental Insurance
• HSA company contributions
• 401K with company match component
• Take what you need Paid Time Off
• Wellness benefits
• WFH office and cell phone/internet stipend
• A FREE MATTRESS plus an awesome Friends and Family discount!