Senior Brand Manager - Own brands Accessories - 18 months FTC (All Genders)

Company Description

With over 25 years’ experience, plus the same enormous passion and ambition we had on day-one, we’re trailblazers in the pet e-commerce industry. Our solutions make over 12 million customers genuinely happier – and that’s something we really care about. We work together to continually adapt; embracing change and the challenges it brings so that we can keep doing better. Join us and discover a place where your potential meets your passion for pets. That’s the power of plus.

Job Description

We are looking for a commercially sharp and analytically curious brand manager to take ownership of our Modern Living brand and cat/dog beds category within Zooplus's Own Brands Accessories portfolio.

This is a cross-functional role where you'll drive performance through insight, influence, and coordination — working closely with Sales, Marketing, Pricing, and Procurement to shape strategy and execution across your brand and category.

Zooplus is Europe's leading online pet platform, operating across 30+ markets. Own Brands Accessories is a growing and strategically important part of our portfolio, with a mandate to build distinctive, customer-relevant brands that drive new customer acquisition and category differentiation.

What You Will Do

Brand & Category Leadership

• Own the commercial performance and strategic direction of the Modern Living brand and the cat/dog beds category.
• Conduct regular brand and category performance reviews — diagnosing what is driving results, identifying risks and opportunities, and translating findings into concrete recommendations.
• Define the growth agenda for your brand and category, balancing short-term commercial priorities with long-term positioning.
• Steer portfolio decisions including assortment optimisation, NPD prioritisation, and delisting recommendations in collaboration with Procurement.
• Monitor market trends, competitor activity, and consumer behaviour to feed strategic foresight into your brand and category planning.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Act as the primary interface for your brand and category across Sales, Marketing, Pricing, and Procurement — building alignment around your priorities without direct authority over those functions.
• Make the commercial case for your brand's needs — visibility, promotional support, pricing architecture — to the relevant stakeholders with data-backed arguments.
• Coordinate cross-functional execution to ensure that strategies agreed in planning translate into actions in market.
• Build productive working relationships with Shop teams across key markets to understand local dynamics and secure commercial support for your brand.

Insight & Analytical Rigour

• Produce performance analyses that go beyond describing what happened — identifying the why and recommending what to do next.
• Translate data from multiple sources — sales, traffic, conversion, pricing, customer behaviour — into a coherent commercial picture.
• Develop and maintain a consistent tracking framework for your brand and category, enabling proactive management rather than reactive reporting.

Escalation & Stakeholder Management

• Identify systemic issues — structural barriers to performance that sit outside your direct influence — and escalate them clearly and constructively with evidence and proposed solutions.
• Communicate proactively with your manager and relevant stakeholders, flagging risks before they become problems and sharing progress against agreed plans.

Qualifications

What We Are Looking For

Experience & Background

• 5-7 years of experience in brand management, category management, or commercial marketing — ideally in e-commerce, retail, or FMCG.
• Proven experience working in a cross-functional environment where influence, not authority, is the primary lever for getting things done.
• Familiarity with e-commerce or digital-first environments is a strong advantage — understanding of conversion funnels, traffic dynamics, and online merchandising will help you hit the ground running.
• Experience in the pet category is a plus, but not a requirement.

Analytical & Commercial Skills

• Strong analytical capability — comfortable working with performance data, identifying root causes, and drawing actionable conclusions rather than descriptive summaries.
• Commercial acumen: able to connect brand and category decisions to P&L outcomes and articulate the business case for your priorities.
• Confident with data tools and performance dashboards; experience with retail or e-commerce analytics platforms is an advantage.

Stakeholder & Communication Skills

• Strong communicator — able to adapt your message for different audiences, from operational colleagues to senior commercial leaders.
• Comfortable making recommendations and defending a point of view with data, even when the answer is uncertain or the audience is skeptical.
• Structured thinker who can translate complex information into clear, concise outputs — whether in an email, a presentation, or a meeting.

Mindset & Ways of Working

• Proactive and self-directed — you identify issues before they are flagged to you and propose solutions rather than waiting for direction.
• Curious and rigorous — you dig beneath the surface of a number and don't accept a convenient explanation without evidence.
• Resilient and pragmatic — you can navigate ambiguity, competing priorities, and organizational complexity without losing focus on what matters.
• Fluent in English; German is an advantage given the importance of the DACH market in our portfolio.

Why Zooplus

• Real responsibility from day one — your brand and category are yours to shape within a clear strategic mandate.
• Broad exposure across commercial functions in a leading European e-commerce business.
• A collaborative, international team with genuine passion for what we do.
• The opportunity to build and demonstrate strategic and commercial skills in a dynamic, fast-moving environment.
• A hybrid working model based in Hamburg, with flexibility and a strong team culture.

Additional Information

Headquartered in Munich, with offices across Madrid, Krakow, Wroclaw, London and Vienna, we collaborate because we genuinely love working together - so you’ll be at the heart of an incredible, multinational team. We trust each other to get the job done, which means you’ll benefit from hybrid working, spending 60% of your time in the office and 40% at home. There’s an option to work for 20 days abroad in approved countries too.

Add to that development opportunities that help you to shape your own career path, excellent training and support, wellbeing offers, subsidised transport or bike leasing, plus 20% discount across all our products, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what sets us apart. Find out more about the specific benefits at your local office in our blog posts.

A note on compensation: We believe in being transparent about salary ranges. The range shown reflects the full scope that the role can grow into over time, depending on experience, skills, and impact. Most offers are positioned around the midpoint of the range, ensuring a fair and consistent approach across our teams.

At zooplus, we believe in equal opportunity and support everyone to fulfil their potential. We recognise the power of listening and learning from each other and embrace diversity and inclusion of all.

#LI-Hybrid