Sustainability Project Manager

The core mission is to turn OTB's ESG ambitions and incoming regulation into projects that actually run. Concretely, this means scoping cross-functional workstreams, setting milestones and responsibilities, and tracking progress against KPIs you help define. A large share of the work sits on the compliance side: translating EU-level requirements, from due diligence rules to product and materials legislation, into action plans, internal processes and practical tools that the brands and hubs can operate. Product sustainability and supply-chain due diligence form the second, equally heavy block. You would coordinate with brands, Product Development and Sourcing Hubs on materials and traceability topics, support certifications, and help build the group's due-diligence framework: mapping ESG risks along the chain, gathering supplier and product data, and agreeing remediation plans where gaps appear. Expect frequent back-and-forth with the Sustainability & Compliance Hubs at Diesel, Staff International and Brave Kid to keep everything aligned with corporate policy. Longer term, the role is about making sustainability operational rather than declarative. Success looks like ESG requirements embedded in how the group buys, develops products and audits suppliers, not a parallel reporting exercise. You would also act as an interface to external consultants and partners engaged on specific projects, which means keeping coherent narratives, budgets and timelines across parties who may not naturally talk to each other.

The steepest learning curve is likely regulatory. The role sits directly in the path of the evolving EU sustainability rulebook for fashion (due diligence, product and materials requirements, reporting) so you would build a rare, practical understanding of how regulation becomes internal process. That translation skill, from legal text to operating model, is increasingly what employers look for and is hard to acquire from the outside. On the project-management side, the exposure is cross-functional by design: Legal, Operations, Procurement, Internal Audit and IT, plus the Sustainability & Compliance Hubs inside Diesel, Staff International and Brave Kid. Managing several workstreams at once, each with different owners and maturities, sharpens stakeholder management, prioritisation and the ability to keep momentum without direct authority. The group's stated appetite for training and internal mobility suggests formal development may supplement this, though the day-to-day learning is largely on the job. Finally, supply-chain due diligence and traceability are technical subjects where fluency is scarce. Working with Sourcing and external partners on certifications, supplier data and risk assessment would give you transferable expertise valuable across luxury, consumer goods and consulting, arguably the most portable capital you can build in this role.

The ideal candidate likely holds a master's degree, ideally in management engineering or a similarly structured academic path, and has at least four years of professional experience. What matters more than the exact sector is the nature of that experience: autonomous management of medium-complexity projects with multiple functions involved, whether gained in project management, consulting or a highly cross-cutting corporate function. The role explicitly welcomes different seniority levels, so the final title and scope would be calibrated to evidence of real project ownership. On skills, expect a strong bias towards structure and analysis. You should be able to break a fuzzy objective into scope, milestones and owners, run several workstreams in parallel, and organise complex data and processes without losing precision. Excellent written and spoken English is essential in an international group, and solid Excel and PowerPoint skills are the everyday instruments of that work, from KPI tracking to management updates. On the softer side, the profile is collaborative but pragmatic: high relational and communication skills, autonomy, attention to detail and a genuine interest in ESG and regulatory evolution. Experience or knowledge of ESG topics (ideally in fashion, luxury, consumer goods or manufacturing) plus familiarity with supply chain, due diligence, product sustainability, traceability or ESG compliance would clearly differentiate. Previous coordination between Corporate and Operations functions is a particularly strong signal.

Because the posting is explicit about structure and cross-functional delivery, your application should demonstrate project ownership rather than ESG enthusiasm alone. Pick two or three projects you personally drove and quantify them: how many functions were involved, what the scope was, which milestones and KPIs you tracked, what obstacles you resolved. Even if they were not sustainability projects, show the transferable machinery (governance, prioritisation, stakeholder alignment) and then add one or two ESG-flavoured examples where possible. Tailor the CV to the three pillars named in the job: regulatory compliance, product sustainability, and supply-chain due diligence. If you have touched any of these (supplier audits, materials certifications, traceability pilots, CSRD or due-diligence preparation) give them prominence and be precise about your actual role versus the team's. In the cover letter, a short paragraph on how you would translate a specific regulatory requirement into an operational process would stand out far more than a generic statement about passion for sustainability. For interviews, prepare for behavioural questions on managing competing priorities and influencing colleagues over whom you have no authority, a very likely theme given the Hub and Brand structure. Getting comfortable with OTB's decentralized logic, where each brand has its own sustainability and compliance hub, will help you discuss how you would keep corporate priorities aligned without stepping on brand autonomy. Familiarity with the group's brands and its founder-driven culture is worth signalling, but evidence of pragmatism and delivery should lead.

The role is positioned squarely at the intersection of regulatory compliance and supply-chain responsibility. For a fashion group with five-plus brands and a complex sourcing base, the bulk of the ESG exposure lies upstream, so product sustainability, materials, traceability, certifications and supplier due diligence are likely the dominant workstreams. This is less about marketing-side storytelling and more about the unglamorous plumbing that makes claims defensible: supplier data, risk mapping, remediation and documentation. OTB operates a structure where each major brand (Diesel, Staff International, Brave Kid) has its own Sustainability & Compliance Hub, while corporate sets policy, standards and priorities. This role would therefore be a connective layer: ensuring that regulatory requirements and group frameworks are interpreted consistently across brands and translated into operational processes that the hubs can run. Given the group's own framing around a concrete, long-term commitment to sustainable business, the emphasis is plausibly on embedding requirements into product development and sourcing rather than parallel reporting. Governance aspects also appear through the risk-monitoring and management-update components, including interaction with Internal Audit. Product-level claims and certifications, meanwhile, connect directly to the consumer-facing side of the brands. Overall, the focus is likely compliance-led and operations-embedded, with the credibility of OTB's sustainability positioning depending on how well this role makes the technical work function across brands.

The most obvious challenge is the regulatory pace. ESG requirements applicable to fashion are still evolving, so the role would involve building processes and frameworks for rules that may shift, creating ambiguity about how much to invest in any given solution. Translating legal text into practical tools that busy brand and sourcing teams will actually adopt is where many such projects stall, and doing it across multiple brands with different maturities adds a second layer of difficulty. Decentralization cuts both ways. With dedicated Sustainability & Compliance Hubs at each major brand, corporate initiatives depend on influence rather than mandate. A cross-functional project manager here must keep several workstreams aligned while respecting brand autonomy and competing operational priorities, a classic setting for slow decisions and repeated re-alignment. Data is another likely friction point: supplier information, traceability and certifications often arrive in inconsistent formats, and making them usable requires persistence and analytical discipline. Finally, expectations management is a quiet challenge. The role supports the group's main ESG projects but does not own the overall strategy, so balancing visibility with realistic delivery, especially when external consultants are involved on adjacent work, demands judgement. Candidates should expect to spend meaningful energy on coordination and follow-up rather than only on analytical work.

A typical day would lean heavily on coordination. You might start by updating project plans and following up on open actions across workstreams, then move into one or two cross-functional meetings, perhaps with a brand's Sustainability & Compliance Hub to align on a policy interpretation, or with Legal and Operations on how a new requirement should land in existing processes. Between meetings, expect analytical work: consolidating supplier or product data, refining KPIs, or drafting slides for a periodic management update. Interactions would be varied by nature. Within corporate, you would regularly touch colleagues in Legal, Operations, Procurement, Internal Audit and IT; on the supply-chain side, Sourcing and Product Development colleagues would be key counterparts. External consultants and partners involved in specific projects would also appear on your calendar, requiring you to track their deliverables and keep them consistent with internal priorities. Weekly rhythms likely rotate around steering meetings, workstream reviews and ad hoc problem-solving. Variability would come from project phases. During definition or regulatory deadlines, the emphasis shifts toward structuring scope, mapping risks and producing documentation. In steadier periods, the focus moves to monitoring, reporting and unblocking issues. The role is hybrid-friendly and time-flexible, so a mix of office presence for relationship-building and remote focus time for analytical work is plausible.

Within OTB, the natural progression would be toward greater ownership of the sustainability project portfolio, potentially evolving into a more senior program or compliance role as the group's regulatory agenda matures. Because the position sits at corporate level and touches multiple brands, visibility to senior management through periodic updates is built in, useful currency for internal advancement. The group also states a commitment to professional development and training, which could support formal certifications or targeted upskilling in areas like ESG reporting or due diligence. Laterally, the exposure across Legal, Operations, Procurement, Internal Audit and IT creates several plausible bridges. Someone who becomes the group's go-to person on supply-chain due diligence could move into a more specialized compliance or supply-chain role, while a product-sustainability angle could lead toward product development or sourcing leadership with a sustainability remit. The brand hubs themselves represent another path: moving closer to a single brand's sustainability team with broader operational responsibility. Externally, the skills are portable. Regulatory translation, cross-functional program management and supply-chain due diligence experience in a multi-brand luxury group is a strong profile for competitors, consultancies and consumer-goods companies facing the same rules. The main constraint is that growth depends partly on how quickly the group's ESG agenda expands, likely, but not guaranteed, at a pace that creates new senior slots.

The most immediate stakeholders are the brand-level Sustainability & Compliance Hubs at Diesel, Staff International and Brave Kid. These teams are your operational counterparts, and the relationship is one of alignment: corporate sets policy, standards and priorities, while the hubs execute inside their brands. A project manager in this role would spend significant time ensuring that interpretations, tools and timelines are consistent across them without being perceived as overreaching into brand territory. Inside corporate, the key interfaces are Legal, Operations, Procurement, Internal Audit and IT, each involved for different reasons. Legal and Internal Audit matter most for compliance and risk frameworks; Operations, Procurement and Sourcing for supply-chain and product topics; IT for the systems and data that support traceability and monitoring. Brand functions such as Product Development also feature, particularly on materials and product sustainability projects. Management is a stakeholder in a different sense, receiving the periodic updates you prepare. Outside the group, external consultants and partners engaged on specific projects are regular contacts, as are suppliers and their representatives indirectly through due-diligence and traceability work. The texture of these interactions varies: internal ones are collaborative and often negotiation-heavy around priorities, while external ones tend to be transactional and deliverable-driven. Managing that mix, and keeping information flowing credibly in both directions, is central to the role.