Lead Color Designer - HOKA Footwear at 450 Deckers America, LLC. — Portland, OR
Full job description
Job Title: Lead Color Designer - HOKA Footwear
Reports to: Sr. Manager, Color Design - HOKA Footwear
Location: Portland, OR (Hybrid)
Typically 3 times per week in office, Tuesday – Thursday
The Role
As Lead Color Designer for HOKA Lifestyle Footwear, you’ll accelerate our footwear refresh engine, delivering newness, speed to market, and growth across lifestyle footwear. Sitting at the intersection of design, product, and merchandising, you’ll elevate color as a tool for storytelling, product differentiation, and consumer impact. You bring a strong point of view, push newness in product, and translate insights into meaningful color solutions, driving clarity and momentum from concept through final product.
Your Impact
- Lead color design execution on category priority projects
- Develop seasonal color solutions across lifestyle footwear
- Work against seasonal project briefs and franchise concepts, supporting new creation, refresh, and optioning strategies
- Manage multiple creation calendars across inline, collaborations, and SMU projects
- Build seasonal color palettes and application strategies aligned to creative direction
- Partner with product design, material design, development, merchandising, and marketing to deliver cohesive product stories
- Support seasonal design strategy and contribute to category-level color direction
- Collaborate with footwear, material, and digital design teams to deliver a holistic product point of view
- Contribute to seasonal creative direction and kick-off moments
- Explore unbriefed opportunities that push HOKA expression and innovation in color
Who You Are
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in industrial design, product design, or related field
- 6–8 years’ experience in footwear color design, with a focus on lifestyle or performance categories
- Advanced understanding of color theory, color application, and storytelling in footwear
- Strong knowledge of footwear construction, materials, and product process, including upper and tooling interaction
- Ability to translate trends and consumer insights into product-relevant color strategies
- Proficient in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, PowerPoint, Miro or Lucid
- Familiarity with generative AI platforms such as Midjourney or Vizcom
- Strong communication and collaboration skills
- Portfolio demonstrating color direction, trend insight, and product execution
What We'll Give You
- Competitive Pay and Bonuses - We’ve created a variety of competitive compensation programs to foster career development, reward success and to show our employees just how much they’re valued.
- Financial Planning and wellbeing - No matter what financial goals our employees have set, we want to help them get there. Our plans provide powerful ways to protect income, pay for expenses and invest in the future.
- Time away from work - Sometimes we need time away to be with family, focus on our health or just simply recharge. Our plans support our employees’ needs to get out, get healthy and come back stronger than ever.
- Extras, discounts and perks - Being a valued member of the Deckers Brands team means more than just a paycheck. From generous discounts to community-based programs, we offer a variety of cool extras
- Growth and Development - Deckers Brands was built on the idea of pursuing passion. That’s why we offer extensive opportunities and support for personal and professional development.
- Health and Wellness - There’s nothing basic about our comprehensive health and wellness programs and offerings. While at work and at play, we aim to support a healthy lifestyle.
$96,600.00 - $130,400.00
Portland, Oregon