Five levers. One analyst. The full P&L for a major US retailer.Position Overview The role owns the analytical engine across a portfolio of North American retail accounts, end to end, from assortment planning through to P&L review.
At most companies these activities sit in separate functions across planning, analytics, finance, and supply chain. At ZURU, they sit on one team by design. This analyst owns the entire commercial cycle for their accounts, not a single slice of it.
The role spans five commercial levers: assortment planning, demand forecasting, inventory and PO management, in-season replenishment, and the full reporting stack from POS through margin and P&L. The breadth is what makes the role hard, and what makes the right person grow fast here.
Position Impact Short term: protects in-season revenue and margin through forecast accuracy, clean PO execution, disciplined chase and cancel decisions, and proactive replenishment across our largest North American retail accounts.
Mid term: drives commercial growth through sharper assortment planning, JBP analytics, and category insights from Circana, NielsenIQ, and Walmart Scintilla that shape how ZURU wins shelf and category share season over season.
Long term: builds the analytical foundation ZURU scales on. As our data infrastructure on Databricks and AWS matures and Claude AI becomes embedded in everyday work, this role becomes increasingly leveraged and strategic, setting the standard for how the function operates globally.
Roles & Responsibilities - Own demand forecasting and inventory ladder management for assigned accounts. Integrate sales voice, retailer signals, and capacity reality into a defended monthly view, scrubbed across customers and items.
- Build and maintain the inventory flow plan, monitor PO release versus commit, track mod set and OOA POs, and flag discrepancies before they become recovery problems.
- Lead the weekly chase and cancel data prep and decision meeting. Action approved decisions across factory, customer service, and finance, and track downstream impact for continuous learning.
- Manage in-season replenishment, instock reporting with diagnosis and plan of action, and proactive inventory pushes with the retailer to keep DC and store inventory continuous.
- Support pre-season line review, slot plan build, toy fair decks, and innovation sessions with POS, competitive, and category analytics that defend item count, shelf share, and price points.
- Run weekly and monthly POS and category insights using Circana, NielsenIQ, and Walmart Luminate Charter. Turn data into a sharp commercial narrative for sales, category, and customer-facing meetings.
- Lead monthly customer P&L reviews. Own margin, markdown, and rollback economics, and support JBP analytics, scenario modelling, and forward-looking commitments.
- Operate fluently in ZURU's modern stack: Databricks (lakehouse), AWS (cloud), Claude AI (everyday work), and our planning suite. Use AI to scale analysis, drafting, and code generation daily.
Skills & Experience- 3 to 5 years in sales operations, planning, category management, or retail analytics. CPG, toy, or consumer brands experience preferred, or top retailer planner / replenishment analyst experience.
- Excel power user (SUMIFS, INDEX MATCH, XLOOKUP, pivot tables, comfortable with 50,000-plus row workbooks). SQL, Databricks, or Python exposure is a plus. AI-fluent: uses Claude or similar tools daily.
- Hands-on experience with at least one major retail analytics platform: Circana, NielsenIQ, Walmart Luminate Charter, or RetailLink. Comfortable building category narratives from raw POS.
- Strong commercial instincts. Able to spot the story behind the numbers and defend a point of view to a sales lead, a buyer, or a CFO. Confident leading meetings and driving decisions. Builder mindset. Direct, fast, and low-ego. You build the model, the deck, and the recommendation rather than wait for a template. You say the hard thing in the meeting, not in the hallway.
