Senior Designer - New Product Development

Location: Remote (Candidates in CA, CO, FL, MD, NC, NY, UT, or WI are preferred. We cannot consider candidates in the following states: CT, DC, GA, HI, MA, ME, MN, NJ, NM, OR, RI, SC, VT)
Type: Full-time; contract-to-hire

The Woobles is a fun, quirky brand with a lean team. We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer to help us invent the future of crafting.

We’re entering a new phase at The Woobles—one where we rapidly concept, prototype, and test new physical products outside the bounds of crochet. That means we’re looking for a senior designer who’s obsessed with figuring out what people really want, and skilled enough to turn that insight into a physical product that people can actually use—and love. Quickly.

This is not a visual design role. This is a hands-on, sprint-style, glue-on-your-fingers, 1-idea-a-day-until-something-works kind of role. You’ll be working side-by-side with our Director of Fiber Arts (our resident expert crafter and tutorial creator), reporting into our Creative Director, and partnering closely with our Chief of Staff to ship scrappy prototypes on a 4-6 week cadence.
We’re building a new product development machine inside a fast-moving, bootstrapped startup. This is your chance to help architect it—and shape the future of where we go next.

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THE ROLE

You’ll be the point person for concepting and prototyping entirely new Woobles products. Your mission is to create test-ready kits every 4-6 weeks that we can validate in-market. You’ll need to:
- Come up with smart, relevant product ideas that match our brand and market
- Evaluate materials, costs, and feasibility across small-scale and mass production
- Rapid Prototype kits by hand, refine them through testing, and spec them for manufacturing
- Ensure the product is not just makeable—but teachable. Think materials, tools, and tutorial design
- Collaborate with our China-based manufacturing team to get samples made, iterate on them, and get to production-ready
- Adapt instructions and packaging to suit the audience and make the learning experience delightful
- Work with internal team members to inform and test concepts across different ages and skill levels, and use that feedback to drive decisions
- Present your thinking clearly—how you got there, what you’re weighing, and what the options are. No fancy decks required. Just clear, honest communication.

REQUIRED SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS
- 5+ years of experience in product design, industrial design, or physical consumer goods
- Deep comfort with user-centered design, rapid prototyping, and cross-functional collaboration
- Experience taking products from idea ? prototype ? sample ? mass production
- Strong understanding of materials, spec’ing, packaging, and manufacturing constraints
- Advanced skills in Adobe Illustrator, and your CAD software of choice for prototype production
- Experience working with overseas manufacturing teams (bonus if it’s in China)
- Strong user research instincts and experience conducting scrappy usability tests
- Excellent communicator—you explain your thinking clearly and concisely
- Bonus: Experience with crafts or handmade products, or a deep love for tactile design

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ABOUT YOU

You’re an all-around good human being. Life is short, and you want to be around people you like.

You’re kind, honest, and trustworthy. You want to work every day with positive, direct people who make you and your day better. No big egos allowed.

You value autonomy. You do your best when you’re given lots of responsibility and independence. You thrive in ambiguity and enjoy making decisions. Lots of them. When you run into problems, you have the resourcefulness to solve it on your own, and the self-awareness to know when you need help. You’re comfortable working remotely.

You care deeply about doing great work. You’ll do whatever it takes to get things done. But you don’t just settle at that. You’re always looking for ways to break your own records the next time around. Your teammates know they can always count on you, just like you can count on them.

You eat feedback for breakfast. You’re always looking for ways to improve (yourself, the process, the product, you name it), so you give and take feedback with equal grace.

You’ve got a sense of humor. Because have you seen what we make? You’re an emoji connoisseur and appreciate the art of well-timed GIFs. You want to work somewhere where a sentence like this is 100% relevant: “There’s 3 dinos on this one but I think it’s OK because one is riding a turtle.”

You’re thoughtful and detail-oriented. You gather as much context as possible – from business to manufacturing constraints – so you can propose creative, on-point solutions no matter your role!

But also fast. We launch anywhere from 3-10 products a month. You understand that one day’s delay can cause much longer than one day’s delay in the overall launch process, given that we’re manufacturing a physical product with teammates all over the world. You turnaround revisions quickly without compromising quality.