Bilingual Market Intelligence Specialist | Beauty

About Merit Manufacturing Merit Manufacturing is a contract manufacturer partnering with growing beauty and personal care brands across hair, skin, and body care. We help brands bring products to market and scale them. We want to be the partner that understands our clients' markets as well as they do. The Role We're looking for an experienced market intelligence professional who can own research on beauty and personal care brands from day one. You'll track our clients, their competitive landscape, and the category trends shaping what consumers buy next. Your work will feed into sales strategy, client conversations, and product recommendations. The goal is actionable insight, not data for its own sake. This isn't an entry-level or AI-prompting role. We need someone who already knows which paid and free tools produce reliable brand, marketplace, and social data, how to cross-check them, and where each one falls short.

What You'll Do
• Client intelligence: Build and maintain profiles on our client brands, covering product lineups, pricing, channel presence (Amazon, TikTok Shop, DTC, retail), review sentiment, and estimated performance.
• Competitive landscape mapping: Identify and track the competitive set around each client by selling channel. Surface emerging and fast-growing brands in those categories.
• Prospect identification: Build qualified lists of growing brands in our categories that fit our manufacturing capabilities, with context on why each is a good target now.
• Category and trend tracking: Monitor ingredient, format, claim, and consumer trends across hair, skin, and body care. Flag what's gaining momentum before it goes mainstream.
• Product expansion opportunities: Spot gaps in our clients' assortments compared with competitors and trend data, such as adjacent SKUs, formats, or categories they could launch. Recurring deliverables:
• A living monthly "20 Things We're Watching" watchlist
• Client-ready briefs before key meetings
• Monthly prospect lists
• Participation in a monthly internal intelligence review
• Tools You Should Already Know (or Can Master Quickly)
• Amazon: Helium10 (required), SmartScout, Jungle Scout, or similar
• TikTok Shop: Kalodata, FastMoss, or Helium10's TikTok tools
• DTC and web traffic: Charm.io, Grips Intelligence, Similarweb, or similar
• Social and trends: Google Trends, TikTok Creative Center, Instagram/TikTok trend tracking, social listening tools
• Retail: Ulta, Sephora, Target, and Walmart shelf and launch tracking
• Prospecting (a plus): LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, or similar
• Syndicated data (a plus): Familiarity with Circana, NielsenIQ, SPINS, or Mintel reports
• You should be able to recommend which subscriptions are worth paying for based on what we need. What We're Looking For
• 3+ years in market research, competitive intelligence, or category insights, ideally in beauty, personal care, or CPG
• Hands-on experience pulling and interpreting Amazon and TikTok Shop marketplace data
• Ability to estimate brand-level performance across channels when no single tool gives the full picture
• Working knowledge of beauty trends, ingredients, and claims (INCI familiarity is a plus)
• Strong executive writing: clear, concise, non-obvious findings that are ready to share without heavy editing
• Self-directed and comfortable owning a research agenda with minimal oversight
• Uses AI to speed up work, but validates everything against primary data Nice to Have
• Experience at or with a contract manufacturer, brand incubator, or beauty agency
• Background supporting sales or business development teams with research
• Portfolio of past market reports or competitive analyses (redacted is fine)

What We Offer
• Initial compensation range: $1,000–$1,200 USD/month, based on experience
• Payments in USD (via PayPal or Wise)
• Fully remote work environment | no time tracker
• Opportunity to help shape a growing market intelligence function
• Long-term growth opportunities

How to Apply
• Please send your resume and LinkedIn profile to talent@meritmfg.com
• One or two samples of past market or competitive research
• A short answer to: Which three tools would you use to estimate a beauty brand's total revenue across Amazon, TikTok Shop, and DTC, and what are the limitations of each? Shortlisted candidates will complete a short paid test project. Email: talent@meritmfg.com