Velocity - Category & Supply Manager

Team: Affordability Marketplace

Location: Bengaluru

Experience: 3-6 years building categories at an e-commerce marketplace

Context:

shop.velocity.in is an EMI-only affordability marketplace. Every order is a no-cost EMI loan on our own NBFC balance sheet, which means categories have to fund subvention - thin-margin selection doesn't work here. Supply comes primarily through distributors and large multi-brand sellers, not brand headquarters. We already have a sales team in motion. You won't build a new one. You'll set category strategy and drive it through the team that's already calling.

What you'll own:

- Category strategy: Which categories we go after, in what order, and why. Selection, pricing, margin, subvention viability.

- Execution through the existing team: Translate strategy into a brief the sales pod can run - target lists, pitch angle, commercial guardrails, what to walk away from. Run the review cadence, reprioritise, unblock.

- The big supply conversations: National distributors, large multi-brand sellers, key accounts. The team handles volume; you handle leverage.

- Commercials: Negotiate landed cost and subvention. Own the rate card.

- Category tree and merchandising: What a customer sees browsing by affordability, not by brand.

- Assortment: Depth, availability, dead-SKU cleanup. Work with the data intern to keep the catalog launch-clean.

What we're looking for:

- You have built or scaled a category at Flipkart, Amazon, Snapmint, Meesho, Croma, Reliance Digital or comparable. Not adjacent to it - you owned it.

- Trade-channel and distributor relationships in at least two of: electronics, appliances, home and furniture, kitchen, luggage. This matters more than D2C brand contacts.

- You can read a margin structure and say in one look whether the category absorbs 9-12% subvention.

- You've directed a sales or BD team toward a category plan and held them to it.

- Comfortable negotiating on price and holding a line.

- Hands-on with catalog systems. Shopify helps.

What this role is not:

- Not a pure BD role, and not a people-management hire. You get an existing team's capacity, not a new org.