Your Role:The Senior Merchant helps to develop and drive a category of business strategies and seasonal assortment plans based upon a detailed knowledge of the brand, intimate understanding of the customer, and studied appreciation of the competition and overall marketplace. They critically evaluate the assortment and reacts to in-season performance/trends and translates to future seasons. The Senior Merchant demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the connection between financial strategies and related merchandise objectives. The position collaborates directly with various cross functional teams including but not limited to design, merchandise planning, demand & deployment, production, stores operations, and visual presentation, to ensure execution of the accurate brand vision and category goals. The Senior Merchant must possess strong leadership skills as they are ultimately responsible for driving cross-functional communication and for motivating the team to be customer-focused, curious, and team oriented in their work. The Senior Merchant supports the Leader in prioritizing workload and plays a supportive role in training merchandising talent within the company. This role owns at least one category within the business.
Your Impact:Leadership
- Lead and demonstrate strong cross-functional partnerships with clear and accurate communication
- Lead and influence solutions-based thinking, conflict resolution and productive dialogue in cross functional and merchandising meetings
- Begin to develop leadership presence and cast positive leadership shadow
- Demonstrate ability to layer strategic thinking and business ownership on top of business execution
- Relationship building by demonstrating corporate culture & values of diversity, equity, inclusivity, open-mindedness, collaboration, and positive intent
- Lead and demonstrate company values
- Consistently react with urgency while comprehending overall strategy
Customer
- Consistently demonstrate an ability to turn customer insight into actionable recommendations as it relates to assortment strategy
- Translate and apply customer and competitive patterning insights into actions that will drive the business and assortment forward
- Remain curious about the customer to better understand their current demands and seek to learn more through store travel and taking on the customer lens
- Partner across merchandising categories to connect dots on larger, total brand trends and patterns
- Understand the customer's lifestyle by staying on top of trends, social media, and pop culture as it specifically relates to the customer, in stores or wherever they are
- Drive customer insight strategy via the internal teams and external focus groups
Product
- Responsible for executing the seasonal financial plan into a product assortment while preserving brand position and brand image
- Consistently demonstrate an ability to turn product insight into actionable recommendations as it relates to assortment strategy
- Accountable for key meeting prep with sample availability, style & color ranking, deck preparation, and ad hoc requests and analysis, always staying agile and flexible
- Responsible for ongoing trend analysis and reporting, inclusive of competitive landscape & competitive patterning
- Drive development of a robust testing agenda to identify and unlock future growth opportunities
Financial
- Accountable for sales and margin targets for their category(s) of business
- Develop roadmap and lineplan architecture by season and align with Planning partners in lineplan reviews to present to Senior Leadership
- Ensure price-value relationship is in line with customer expectation
- Understand product trends and historical data at the category level in order to manage in-season opportunities
- Actively participate and influence in costing meetings by floorset
Talent
- Select, train, coach, retain and develop a diverse team to ensure effective performance and growth through consistent on-the-job training
- Demonstrate capability to cultivate and promote talent within Merchandising
- Manage yourself as well as your team (i.e., handling high pressure situations, proactive problem solving, positive leadership shadow, maintaining healthy relationships across the organization)
- Actively give, seek and take action on feedback to and from all levels to enable growth and development in role
- Minimum of one direct report
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Your Experience:- Bachelor's degree in Fashion Merchandising, Business Administration or relevant area
- 5-7 years of experience in merchandising and 2+ years of management experience
- Strong understanding of vertically integrated retail operations
- High intelligence with a true entrepreneurial risk mentality, strong analytical and strategic thinking skills
- Acute sense of brand and customer intimacy
- Acute eye for product and trend with proven talent to envision and interpret fashion trends
- Proficient in conflict management and problem-solving
- Exceptional ability to bridge and enhance cooperative working relationships
- Strong organizational skills
- Ability to multi-task and prioritize
- Demonstrated ability in communication, presentation, negotiating and influencing skills
- Ability to lead and inspire with unquestionable integrity and trust
- Systems and computer proficiency (MS Office, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel)
