Job Description

Job Summary:

Midea America Corp. is a U.S. subsidiary within Midea Group, the Fortune 500 giant known for making life easier for millions around the globe. As the world’s top maker of home appliances, Midea is proud of its 166,000+ employees and presence in 200+ countries, including here in the U.S. Headquartered in Parsippany, N.J., with an innovation hub in Louisville, Kentucky, Midea America provides practical innovations that surprise and delight, creating moments to cherish at home.

Midea's lineup of appliances - from refrigerators to air conditioners, laundry solutions and floor care - are high quality, reliable, and affordable. By thoughtfully engineering performance, convenience, and design into every product, Midea delivers on the promise of every appliance.

We are seeking an experienced industrial design leader to support our growth. This individual will oversee the design of small countertop appliances, such as electric pressure cookers, air fryers, electric grills, blenders, food processors, and coffee makers. Beyond industrial design, the ideal candidate will lead product and market research activities, many of which will focus on gathering feedback on design elements like new appearance concepts, user interfaces, features, and marketing materials. The candidate will be considered an expert on the North American market and consumer, providing design guidance to our global team, especially those based in China. Responsibilities include establishing or maintaining a Visual Brand Language (VBL), competitive benchmarking of product designs through research, creating new concepts to align with customer needs, conducting detailed market and product analysis for each product category, and prototyping new concepts for evaluation.

This position requires close collaboration with global teams and some domestic and international travel would be required.

Essential Job Responsibilities:

• Responsible for the North American Small Division Appliance industrial design research and development projects, feature development, collaboration, and the establishment of plan of actions and milestone tracking.
• Collaborate with our insights team to test new product concepts with focus groups, online studies and provide strategic feedback to the development team.
• Conduct market research for trending design features, textures, materials and colors.
• Conduct competitive benchmarking regarding appearance, feature set, functionality, installation, etc. as well as benchmarking Midea products and proposals - converting the results into an overall strategy and direction of the products.
• Will be familiar with various manufacturing and prototyping processes and methods in order to recommend cost effective means to achieve the desired appearances generated.
• Must be a self-starter who can evaluate the product portfolios and identify numerous opportunities and will work independently to further improve products.
• Will complete design and development of new product appearance parts.
• Work closely with the North American R&D team and the Chinese Overseas R&D team in the design and development of new concepts in order to maximize acceptance opportunities of technical design.
• Actively participate in technical project reviews and innovation research projects.
• Pioneer, refine, and effectively communicate novel industrial design tools and processes to drive collaborative innovation within our team.
• Cross-functional cooperation with various internal and external engineering teams to jointly carry out project work.
• Collaborate with product management and R&D team on multi-generational product plan roadmaps.
• Implement projects and special tasks as needed.

Qualifications:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.

• Bachelor’s Degree and/or above in industrial design
• At least 3+ years’ experience working as an industrial designer.
• Experience working on consumer products.
• Proficient in common industrial design graphics and image processing software, such as the Adobe series, Solidworks, KeyShot, etc.
• Strong design expression skills and must provide a portfolio of past design works.
• Have good creative thinking abilities, user empathy, strong user perception, and strong understanding and analytical abilities.

Job Skills:

• Hands on ability to aid in prototyping new concepts.
• Familiar with common manufacturing processes
• Good Communication skills both written and verbal.
• Strong organizational skill and ability to prioritize tasks appropriately.
• A self-starter and self-disciplined in accomplishing tasks.
• Strong desire to learn with ability to be self-taught.

Midea America Corp, is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

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