I'm a bit confused how to do this... I need to redirect many product pages and other well ranged and PR'd pages for a site redesign. I'm going to be reorganizing and naming categories.

I have SSU 3.8.8 installed. Can I just reset the cache in SSU? Will it automatically create 301 redirects for me? Or, is there a better more foolproof way to hardcode the redirects? Then Change them in SSU and remove the hardcode after the new urls are indexed? What's better, renaming products or creating new products?

I don't want to lose any seo juice that my site already has. Any advice would be helpful. Just need some help on how to best handle this!