Quality Manager - Textile Manufacturing & Customer Quality

Position Overview

The Quality Manager owns product and process quality across MWW textile and on-demand manufacturing. This is a hands-on role that combines textile knowledge, floor-level problem solving, customer complaint investigation, quality data analysis, incoming material inspection, retained standards, external laboratory testing, supplier quality, and corrective-action leadership.

Core expectation

This is not a desk-only quality role. The manager is expected to go to the manufacturing floor, inspect defects personally, work with operators and supervisors, determine what is MWW-related versus customer/platform-related, and drive corrective action to completion.

Essential Job Functions

• Own manufacturing quality. Establish and manage quality performance across incoming material, printing, pressing, cutting, sewing, finishing, final QC, shipping, and relevant woven-product operations.

• Floor-level investigation. Spend significant time in manufacturing areas observing processes, inspecting rejected product, interviewing operators, reviewing machine/process conditions, running controlled trials, and confirming corrective action.

• Customer quality investigations. Investigate complaints and quality reports from Printify, Zazzle, and other customers/platforms. Use order numbers, production history, artwork/specification information, physical samples, and process evidence to determine whether the cause is MWW, the customer/platform, or a combination.

• Customer-facing reporting. Prepare clear written reports showing affected orders, examples, findings, root cause, responsibility, immediate containment, corrective action, and preventive action.

• Quality performance reporting. Report units produced, off-quality units, defect percentage, defect types, product/process/machine trends, and whether performance is improving or deteriorating.

• Textile defect expertise. Recognize and investigate defects related to fabric construction and behavior, including stretch, necking, shrinkage, shade variation, distortion, ghosting, shadowing, migration, press marks, sublimation/print variation, and cutting/sewing issues.

• Incoming material quality. Inspect or oversee inspection of fabric, yarn, purchased components, packaging, and other critical inputs; quarantine and escalate nonconforming lots as required.

• Retained standards. Maintain approved retained samples / golden standards for new fabrics and critical materials and compare future lots against those references.

• Testing and compliance coordination. Coordinate product testing with external laboratories such as Intertek, QIMA, or other customer-required labs; prepare samples, maintain records, review failures, and coordinate retesting.

• Supplier quality. Work with Purchasing/Sourcing and suppliers when raw material causes quality failure; document evidence, identify affected lots, request corrective action, and verify improvement.

• Corrective and preventive action. Lead containment, root-cause analysis, CAPA, and verification for major or recurring defects. Reprinting or replacing an order alone is not considered permanent closure.

• Quality systems and standards. Create and maintain inspection standards, defect definitions, work instructions, testing methods, sampling plans, retained standards, and training materials.

• Team leadership. Direct or coordinate day-to-day QC resources and floor inspectors. Build a structure in which inspectors identify issues while the manager analyzes trends, solves systemic problems, and prevents recurrence.

• Cross-functional partnership. Work closely with Manufacturing, Engineering, Print/Press, Cut/Sew, Weaving, Shipping, Purchasing/Sourcing, Customer Service, IT/Data teams, and senior management.

Textile / Process Knowledge Expected

• Fabric construction, quality and performance (i.e., stretch, shrinkage, necking, bow/skew, dimensional stability, color/shade variation, and lot-to-lot variability)

• Digital textile printing and/or dye-sublimation transfer processes, including common print/press defects such as ghosting, shadowing, migration, transfer marks, contamination, and color/contrast variation.

• Cut-and-sew quality, woven textile quality, and how upstream material/process changes affect finished products.

• Ability to distinguish artwork/specification/input problems from internal manufacturing defects.

Quality Data & Reporting

• Units manufactured and units off-quality by product and process.

• Defect percentage and first-pass yield (FPY).

• Top defect categories and Pareto trends.

• Quality by machine, operation, product, customer/platform, and material lot where data is available.

• Reprint/rework trends and repeat defects.

• Corrective-action status and effectiveness.

• Customer complaint trends and examples supported by order-level evidence.

Experience and Qualifications

• Demonstrated manufacturing quality experience with meaningful textile/fabric exposure required.

• Hands-on experience investigating quality issues in a production environment.

• Strong written reporting and data-analysis skills; ability to communicate findings to both manufacturing teams and customers/platform partners.

• Experience with root-cause analysis, corrective action, inspection/testing, and quality metrics.

• Experience with sublimation, digital textile printing, woven textiles, cut-and-sew, supplier quality, or laboratory testing is strongly preferred.

• Ability and willingness to work actively on the manufacturing floor and travel between MWW facilities as required.

Key Competencies

• Strong textile foundation and curiosity about how materials and processes behave.

• Persistent root-cause problem solving; willing to follow a defect through the full process.

• Data-driven decision making and clear documentation.

• Ability to train operators and build practical quality discipline on the floor.

• Customer-facing professionalism and confidence explaining evidence-based findings.

• Strong ownership, urgency, follow-through, and continuous-improvement mindset.

Success Measures

• First-pass yield (FPY) and defect-rate improvement.

• Reduction in reprints, rework, and Cost of Poor Quality.

• Reduction in repeat defects and customer complaints.

• Incoming material / supplier defect performance.

• Corrective-action closure time and effectiveness.

• Accuracy and usefulness of customer quality reports.

• Documented improvement in the highest-volume / highest-cost defect categories.