Company description

First Bloom started as a charming little corner store in Bloomville, New York — a place where you could find groceries, produce and most ingredients you’d need to make a wonderful meal (plus, a few things just to make you happy). It was small. It was specific. People drove a long way to get there and we’d like to think it was worth it.

This fall, we’re opening a second location in Brooklyn Heights. It will be bigger and more ambitious than what we built upstate. There will be a nice coffee program, a small cafe with fabulous prepared foods, and a retail floor with spectacular produce.

Job description

We’re looking for a founding General Manager who can help us build it, open it, and run it exceptionally well. Someone who loves pristine produce, who’s painfully detail oriented, who knows that a lovely customer service experience is exceedingly rare, which is why we need it now more than ever.

The role:
● Work closely with the founder and owner, Alison Roman, report directly to her chief of staff and lead all day-to-day operations of the Brooklyn location.
● Lead pre-opening operations: staffing, systems, vendor relationships, layout, etc.
● Hire, train, and manage a team across retail, prepared foods, and coffee. Set the tone, encouraging a fun, exciting, well-run place with positive work culture.
● Be mindful of the customer experience. First Bloom has a specific feeling: personal, warm, knowledgeable, dare we say…whimsical. It’s your job to make sure that feeling comes across.
● Oversee inventory, purchasing, and vendor relationships for grocery, produce, and specialty goods. Know what’s on the shelf, where it came from and why it’s there.
● Manage the prepared foods and coffee programs in collaboration with culinary and beverage leads.
● Track and manage the P&L (labor, COGS, waste, margin) and feel comfortable sharing feedback on where we can improve.

What we’re looking for:
● 5+ years of experience in specialty retail, hospitality, or food and beverage, with at least 3–5 years in a leadership or management role.
● Experience opening something from the ground up, or at least a strong desire to do it for the first time. We aren’t quite a startup, but we’re not not a startup.
● A multi-faceted background, understanding hospitality, retail and food.
● Strong people management skills. You can hire well, give kind and helpful direct feedback and build a team that loves where they work and what they do.
● Operational fluency: scheduling, inventory systems, vendor management, P&L basics. Base knowledge of Square and or Shopify, Google Sheets, etc.
● Good instincts and good taste for quality and curation while prioritizing individuality.
● Low ego, high standards. A highly collaborative self-starter who appreciates that it truly takes a village.
● Flexibility! Both logistically (scheduling) and in spirit.
● Genuine enthusiasm for hospitality, food, cooking, and the kind of independent businesses that make a neighborhood worth living in.

Nice to have:
● Experience with specialty grocery or curated retail.
● Knowledge of a high-end coffee program. We’ll have great support from our coffee partners, but knowing about sourcing, equipment, training, etc. is a huge plus.
● Familiarity with New York culture, trends, dining, retail.
● You’ve read Alison’s newsletter or at least cooked a recipe or two. Familiarity with her style will be helpful in knowing how this place is going to come to life.

The details:
● Full-time, on-site in Brooklyn.
● Competitive salary and benefits, commensurate with experience.
● Start date: Late summer 2026 to allow time for pre-opening buildout and hiring

Compensation

this position is: salaried, more than $100,000

Application instructions

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Deadline

July 01, 2026