Special Projects Lead - Category Expansion

CAN YOU HELP US FIX THE WORLD'S MOST BROKEN SUPPLY CHAIN? The fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments a year. 60% end up in landfill, not because people don't want these clothes, but because the supply chain for getting secondhand fashion from donation to resale is completely offline, manual and broken. Fleek is fixing this. Our mission is to make secondhand the first choice. We're building the infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing trade, through a B2B marketplace and the AI systems digitising the supply chain behind it. Through Fleek, vintage stores, online resellers and retail buyers source graded secondhand inventory directly from wholesalers and rag houses across multiple countries. Our key enabler is FleekSort, an AI model fine-tuned on secondhand fashion that can grade, price and categorise items with just a photo. Turning what has historically been an opaque and manual trade into a structured, searchable and tradable global inventory layer. Since 2022, we've saved 9 million items from landfill while tripling in size year-on-year. We're backed by some of the world's best investors, including a16z, Y Combinator and HV Capital, alongside world-class angels who helped build Depop, Shopify, and Postmates. Today, we serve thousands of resellers and retailers across the UK, Europe and the US. With the secondhand fashion market projected to reach $350B by 2027, Fleek is building the AI-native operational and financial backbone for secondhand commerce globally. We're looking for people who want to build something that matters and move fast doing it. Sounds good? Keep reading. ABOUT THE ROLE We're hiring a Special Projects Lead to take Fleek's new category bets from thesis to proven economics. Each is a new business line that could add £5M+ in GMV, opening a new supply category or a new sourcing geography for the marketplace. Here's what makes these bets unusually winnable. Fleek already owns the demand. Most of the live bets sell to buyers who transact on Fleek today, so they're a supply-first test rather than a two-sided cold start. Your job on a new bet is to find and onboard the supply, sell it into demand that already exists and read the economics fast. Every bet runs through the same gates. If a bet misses its gates, you kill it with evidence and move to the next one. If it works and you're running it well, you don't have to hand it off. You scale into owning the category, with supply, acquisition and ops building out under you. Think of this seat as a venture builder inside Fleek. One thing this is not. We're not building a sales team or a sales culture, and this is not an AE or account manager role with a new title. You'll work directly with the founders and our commercial lead, close to the centre of the company. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Run bets through the gates: take each bet from market research to first suppliers to first GMV to a feasible-or-not call, with win metrics and kill metrics defined before you start. - Go where the supply is: get on planes. You'll visit suppliers, graders and rag houses in the markets your bets open up, because this trade is built face to face and the best stock never gets listed anywhere. - Sell supply into live demand: onboard brands, brokers, graders and wholesalers, then get Fleek's existing buyers transacting on the new inventory. The sell is fast, informal and relationship-led, over WhatsApp and Instagram as often as in a boardroom. - Make the kill calls: hold a clear view of unit economics and the competitive landscape on every bet. Double down or cut on evidence, not attachment. - Be the ops function, for now: work out importer-of-record structures, duties, freight cost and last mile for each new flow. - Ride the AI infrastructure: our acquisition team has spent months building the agentic outreach and enrichment engine. You'll plug your bets into it and extend it, rather than building from a blank page or adding headcount. - Learn the actual trade: how stock is graded, routed and priced across markets, and who's sitting on good inventory that nobody has approached. You'll get deep in it fast. WHAT YOU BRING - Zero-to-one is your natural habitat. You've built something from nothing as a founder, an early employee or the person who started a new line inside an existing company. You've operated without a playbook and you didn't wait for one. - Operator and commercial in one person. You build the machine and you carry the number. You're not pure strategy and you're not pure sales, and you're comfortable being measured on GMV within your first quarter. - AI fluency. You work with agents and automations daily and you'd rather build a workflow than repeat a task. Strong signals on top of that: - An instinct for physical goods. You understand inventory, margins and trading relationships, or you've worked around fashion, resale or marketplaces. - Deals you structured yourself, at any size, that didn't exist before you wrote them. - Exposure to cross-border trade, logistics or supply chain operations. Nice to Have - Direct experience in resale, surplus or secondary-market inventory - Experience launching a new market, geography or product line from scratch - Established networks in international sourcing markets WHAT YOU'LL GET - Generous equity: being on Fleek means you'll own a part of it - Comprehensive healthcare coverage - A collaborative team in a lovely office in the heart of East London - Access to founders. We're a small team and they're heavily involved (and good fun!) - Exclusive employee discounts to buy on Fleek - Access to borrow any item from our collection of vintage and reworks in the office - A disproportionate level of responsibility and the opportunity to drive massive impact How We Work Fleek is an in-office company. We're based at Commercial Street, E1 (Liverpool Street / Aldgate East). We operate a fully in-person culture at our office in Shoreditch, with trust-based flexibility. We hire adults and trust them to perform. The Practicalities - Location: London HQ, Commercial Street, E1 (Liverpool Street / Aldgate East) - Stage: Post-Series B, hyper-growth - Team: 200 across three geographies - Culture: High ownership, non-hierarchical, fast-moving. Founder-led with strong opinions loosely held. OUR VALUES Five values shape how we work at Fleek: - Dream Big and Disrupt Yourself: Push the most ambitious version of what you're building. Step out of your comfort zone. Nothing is out of reach. - Absolute Ownership: The buck stops with you. Drive initiatives to completion. Experiment, learn, persevere. The job isn't done until the job is done. - Curiosity Leads the Way: Don't accept anything at face value. Ask questions you don't know the answer to. That's how you innovate. - Talk to the Customer: Deeply understand their challenges, motivations, and ambitions. Every decision starts with the customer at the centre. - Embrace Diversity: A global team building for a global supply chain. Bring your authentic self and embrace the diversity of everyone you encounter. Ready to build the infrastructure for the world's fastest-growing fashion economy? If you want to work on genuinely hard problems, with a world-class team, at a company that's tripling annually, we'd love to hear from you.