Description of Responsibilities

In this role, you are a critical part of the organization. You support driving sales, margin, and inventory turn in close partnership with many talented teams. You achieve or exceed sales, discount and sell thru goals through keen business acumen and operational excellence. You anticipate the needs of the business by providing relevant, timely and actionable analysis. You are fostering a culture of high performance. You live in the details but think strategically and communicate clearly, with an emphasis on continuous improvement across the organization.

Overview of Critical Duties

• Partner with the Director to develop and enhance planning processes, reporting, and systems.
• Support managing the buy plan, planning and forecasting processes and planning calendar. Geographically responsible for Us, Canada, and Mexico.
• Assist with build out of detailed annual store plans by store, floor set, and category to recommend optimal receipt flow. Measure performance against plan and share monthly hindsight.
• Initiate strategies to maximize business, always supported by data and in partnership with Buying, Planning, and Allocation teams. Provide weekly business recap identifying risks and opportunities to drive growth.
• Self-motivated to regularly deliver ad hoc actionable analysis from top-line to store to sku level. Ability to influence decisions while building and motivating a cohesive organization.
• Clearly communicate to all cross-functional teams: Buying, Allocation, Finance, Logistics, Operations the financial objectives, action plans, opportunities, learnings and liabilities of the business in order to enable strategic decision making.
• Build strong relationships with and leverage cross-functional teams to create opportunities and efficiencies and minimize risk. Ensure cross-departmental knowledge sharing and mutual understanding of state of business.
• Work closely with the Buying team to analyze seasonal merchandise assortments and execute merchandising strategies including creation of Sku plans at the category, core/fashion, and store cluster level.
• Support buying decisions based on continuous and thorough analysis of retail business prior to each market to achieve increased sales, profitability and sell-thru. Understand leveraging systems is critical and essential to meeting deadlines. Flexibility to react and reforecast due to emerging business trends.
• Monitor markdown cadence, providing data supported solutions and scenarios to explore ways to elevate the brand while maximizing sales and margin and achieving sell-thru targets. Maintains partnership with Outlet business to identify mutually beneficial liquidation strategies.
• Provide forecasts to Production and Warehouse partners for appropriate factory and warehouse resource-allocation

Qualifications

• Must have 3+ yrs. experience in Retail Planning; Store Planning and/or allocation experience preferred.
• Minimum Bachelor’s Degree
• Must possess advanced Excel Skills and technical proficiency
• Must have strong analytical skills, creative problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate and thrive in a fast paced, lean environment
• A strong communicator who can influence decision making
• A passionate contributor who cares deeply about the quality of their work
• An inspirational team member who can rally colleagues and develop strong cross-functional relationships
• Previous experience working for a vertical retailer