Manager, Art Operations & Innovation

Role Intent

Advance the creative and operational capability of the Art organization by connecting external creative intelligence, emerging technology, technical excellence, and modern ways of working.

This role helps ensure the Art organization stays creatively relevant, technically strong, and operationally future-ready by identifying what is changing in art, graphics, culture, technology, and the marketplace—and translating those changes into actionable creative opportunities, new capabilities, and improved ways of working.

Position Summary

The Manager, Art Operations & Innovation is responsible for evolving both what the Art organization creates and how the organization creates it.

This role maintains an active view of the external creative landscape, identifies meaningful shifts in graphics, culture, technology, and consumer behavior, and helps translate those signals into relevant opportunities for Garan, its brands, customers, and retail partners.

At the same time, the role drives innovation across AI, creative technology, process improvement, technical execution, and production readiness. Working across Art, Design, Product Development, Technical Design, Sourcing, Technology, and Global teams, this leader connects creative thinking with operational discipline—helping the organization identify new opportunities, experiment intelligently, improve how work gets done, and scale successful ideas.

Success in this role means building an Art organization that sees change earlier, creates with greater relevance and originality, adopts new tools and capabilities faster, and executes with greater speed, consistency, and technical excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Creative Intelligence, Translation & Experimentation

• Stay connected to the evolving graphic and creative landscape across fashion, retail, culture, social, entertainment, technology, and emerging design.
• Identify and validate meaningful creative signals, separating lasting opportunities from short-term noise.
• Develop a clear point of view on what’s next in art and graphics and what it means for Garan, its brands, customers, and retail partners.
• Translate emerging signals into original, age-right, brand-right, and customer-right creative opportunities across categories and retailers.
• Lead experimentation with new graphic aesthetics, techniques, materials, placements, digital tools, and AI-enabled creation.
• Partner with Art and Design leadership to move the strongest ideas from inspiration into concepts, testing, and scalable creative capabilities.
• Foster calculated creative risk-taking while balancing relevance, originality, commercial viability, and execution.

AI, Emerging Technology & Creative Innovation

• Stay current on emerging AI, digital design, visualization, automation, and creative technologies that could improve how artwork is researched, imagined, developed, and produced.
• Lead experimentation with AI as both a creative accelerator and productivity tool.
• Evaluate new technologies based on creative value, business usefulness, scalability, quality, and brand integrity.
• Develop practical AI workflows, playbooks, prompting approaches, and guardrails that strengthen creative output.
• Partner with Technology and functional teams to move successful experiments into sustainable tools and workflows.
• Build practical fluency with new tools across the Art organization through adoption, coaching, and hands-on application.

Operational Excellence & Process Innovation

• Improve how artwork moves from concept through development, approval, production readiness, and final execution.
• Identify bottlenecks, unnecessary manual work, duplication, and legacy processes and implement practical solutions.
• Develop scalable workflows, standards, templates, and best practices that improve speed, quality, consistency, and accountability.
• Ensure processes support creative agility rather than creating unnecessary constraints.
• Improve visibility, prioritization, communication, and workflow transparency across Art and cross-functional teams.
• Partner with Technology teams to improve PLM, digital asset management, automation, file management, and related systems.

Technical Excellence & Production Innovation

• Establish and maintain standards that ensure artwork is technically accurate, production-ready, and manufacturable.
• Stay current on emerging print techniques, embellishments, materials, applications, and production capabilities that can expand the creative toolbox.
• Partner with Product Development, Technical Design, Sourcing, vendors, and Global teams to connect creative ambition with production feasibility.
• Identify opportunities where new production techniques can create meaningful creative differentiation.
• Improve artwork specifications, production files, documentation, and technical best practices.
• Reduce preventable revisions and production issues while protecting creative intent.

Strategic Partnership & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Serve as a connector between creative direction, operations, technology, production, and commercial opportunity.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives across Art, Design, Product Development, Technical Design, Sourcing, Technology, and Global teams.
• Translate emerging creative, technical, and operational opportunities into clear recommendations for leadership.
• Identify risks, opportunities, and capability gaps and recommend practical solutions.
• Build business cases for new tools, technologies, processes, or creative capabilities.
• Communicate recommendations, progress, and opportunities clearly to senior leadership and business partners.

Qualifications

Experience

• ·8–12 years of experience in apparel graphics, art, design, creative development, creative operations, product development, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of apparel graphics, creative development, and customer-relevant design.
• Demonstrated curiosity about culture, fashion, retail, graphic design, consumer behavior, technology, and emerging creative movements.
• Experience translating trends or external creative intelligence into actionable creative direction.
• Experience leading innovation, experimentation, process improvement, or capability-building initiatives.
• Strong understanding of apparel manufacturing, print techniques, production artwork, and technical execution.
• Experience with AI-enabled creative workflows and emerging digital tools.
• Experience leading cross-functional initiatives and organizational change.
• Experience with PLM or digital asset management systems preferred.

Core Competencies

Creative Curiosity & External Orientation  Continuously looks outside the organization for new ideas, aesthetics, behaviors, technologies, and cultural shifts.

Creative Judgment  Identifies which signals matter and understands how they can translate into relevant, differentiated creative opportunities.

AI & Technology Fluency  Uses emerging technology to expand creative possibility as well as improve productivity and execution.

Operational Excellence  Builds scalable ways of working that improve speed, quality, consistency, and accountability.

Technical Expertise  Understands apparel artwork, print production, manufacturability, production readiness, and factory execution.

Commercial Judgment  Balances creativity and cultural relevance with customer fit, scalability, longevity, risk, and business potential.

Collaboration & Influence  Builds trusted partnerships across creative, technical, operational, technology, sourcing, and global teams.

Salary range is $140K–$150K based on qualifications