Senior Site Merchandiser, SwimOutlet.com

About the Role

SwimOutlet.com is the leading online destination for swimmers, swim teams, families, coaches, lifeguards, fitness swimmers, and aquatic organizations. We are looking for a Senior Site Merchandiser who will own the merchandising experience across SwimOutlet.com.

This role is responsible for one simple but important outcome:

Every customer who comes to SwimOutlet.com should quickly feel that the site understands who they are, what they need, and how they shop.

The Site Merchandiser will report to the President and Chief Product Officer, who oversees the customer-facing experience across SwimOutlet. This person will work especially closely with Buying, Planning, Product, Marketing, Creative, Search, Analytics, and Technology.

This is not simply a role for someone who can build category pages, schedule promotions, or move products around a website. We are looking for someone who understands merchandising, customers, data, and AI and can translate assortment, inventory, customer intent, seasonality, and behavioral signals into an intuitive shopping experience.

We are building an AI-forward company. The person in this role should be excited about using AI every day, not occasionally, to analyze, create, automate, test, and improve how merchandising work gets done.

The right person will constantly ask:

• Who is this customer?
• What are they trying to accomplish?
• What products matter most to them?
• What information do they need to make a decision?
• What is creating friction?
• Does this experience feel authentic to the swimming community?
• Are we presenting the right assortment at the right time?
• Are we helping customers discover products they did not initially know they needed?
• Can AI help us understand this problem faster or create a dramatically better experience?

What You Will Own

The SwimOutlet Shopping Experience

Own the merchandising of SwimOutlet.com across the customer journey, including:

• Homepage merchandising
• Navigation and taxonomy
• Category and collection pages
• Product sorting and ranking
• Search merchandising
• Filters and facets
• Product discovery
• Cross-selling and complementary products
• Seasonal shops
• Event-driven merchandising
• Sport and activity-based shopping experiences
• New product launches
• Brand shops
• Promotional merchandising
• Educational and inspirational shopping content

Your responsibility is not simply to fill these surfaces. Your responsibility is to make them useful.

Persona-Based Merchandising

SwimOutlet serves customers with very different needs.

These may include:

• Competitive swimmers
• Swim parents
• Coaches
• Swim teams
• Recreational swimmers
• Fitness and lap swimmers
• Lifeguards
• Swim schools
• Aquatic facilities
• Water sports participants
• Customers shopping for training, competition, recreation, or vacation

You will develop a deep understanding of these customers and ensure the site experience reflects how each group actually thinks and shops.

A competitive swimmer preparing for championship season should have a different journey than a parent buying their child's first pair of goggles.

A coach outfitting a team should have a different experience than someone shopping for a swimsuit for vacation.

You will help make those experiences feel intentional rather than generic.

AI as a Core Part of the Job

This role will use AI extensively.

We do not view AI as a separate initiative or a tool someone uses occasionally. We expect it to become part of the daily operating system for merchandising.

You should already be an active AI user and be excited about continually experimenting with new tools, models, agents, and workflows.

You will use AI to help:

• Analyze large amounts of customer behavior and merchandising data
• Identify patterns in search terms, reviews, returns, questions, and customer feedback
• Understand different customer personas and shopping missions
• Identify gaps in taxonomy, navigation, filters, and product attributes
• Analyze assortments and competitive positioning
• Generate and test merchandising hypotheses
• Improve product discovery and recommendations
• Identify cross-sell and bundle opportunities
• Find products that are incorrectly categorized or poorly attributed
• Accelerate category and seasonal planning
• Research emerging customer and product trends
• Create first drafts of merchandising strategies and analyses
• Automate repetitive merchandising work
• Build workflows that allow one strong merchant to accomplish substantially more
• Partner with Product and Technology on AI-powered shopping experiences

We are particularly interested in people who have gone beyond simply asking ChatGPT questions.

You may have built custom GPTs, agents, automated workflows, structured prompts, AI-assisted analysis processes, or other systems that materially changed how you work.

You do not need to be an engineer.

You do need to be curious, technically comfortable, highly experimental, and capable of figuring out how to use new technology without waiting for someone else to write an instruction manual.

AI should make you a more capable merchant. It does not replace merchandising judgment, customer empathy, taste, or accountability.

You will remain responsible for the quality of the decisions and experiences produced with it.

Merchandising + Buying Partnership

Partner closely with the Buying and Planning teams to translate the assortment strategy into the customer experience.

You will:

• Understand what we bought and why
• Understand inventory positions and availability
• Understand key brands, categories, products, trends, and seasonal opportunities
• Identify gaps in assortment based on customer behavior
• Surface high-priority inventory appropriately without compromising the customer experience
• Give Buyers feedback on what customers are searching for, discovering, abandoning, and purchasing
• Help determine which products deserve greater visibility
• Ensure newness reaches the appropriate customer
• Collaborate on seasonal and category strategies
• Use AI and data to surface insights that would be difficult to identify manually

Buying owns what we carry.

Site Merchandising owns how customers experience what we carry.

The two teams must operate as close partners.

Customer Experience

Continuously identify and eliminate friction from the shopping journey.

You will evaluate questions such as:

• Can customers find what they are looking for quickly?
• Are categories organized the way swimmers actually think?
• Are filters useful?
• Are we overwhelming customers with unnecessary choices?
• Are important products buried?
• Are customers receiving enough information to confidently choose between products?
• Are we helping customers understand technical differences between products?
• Are we creating useful pathways for customers who do not know exactly what they need?
• Does the site feel authentic to someone who participates in the sport?

You should be comfortable challenging existing experiences when customer behavior suggests there is a better way.

Data, AI and Continuous Optimization

Use quantitative data, qualitative information, AI, and experimentation to continuously improve merchandising.

You will regularly analyze:

• Conversion rate
• Revenue per visitor
• Search behavior
• Zero-result searches
• Category performance
• Product click-through rates
• Product discovery
• Filter usage
• Navigation behavior
• Exit rates
• Add-to-cart behavior
• Inventory availability
• Sell-through
• New product adoption
• Customer feedback
• Reviews and customer questions
• Testing results

You should be highly curious about why something happened, not simply report that it happened.

Use AI to dramatically accelerate the process of moving from large amounts of information to insight, hypothesis, experiment, and action.

Seasonal and Commercial Planning

Build merchandising strategies around the rhythms of the swimming customer.

Examples include:

• Back-to-swim
• High school swim seasons
• Club swimming seasons
• Championship season
• Tech suit season
• Summer recreation
• Lifeguard season
• Learn-to-swim
• Holiday
• Training cycles
• Team purchasing periods

Partner with Buying, Marketing, Creative, and Product to ensure merchandising supports these moments without allowing the site to become overly promotional or campaign-driven.

Product and Technology Partnership

Work closely with Product and Engineering to improve the tools and capabilities required for great merchandising.

Help define requirements for areas such as:

• Search
• Recommendations
• Personalization
• Navigation
• Filters
• Product ranking
• Automated merchandising
• Customer segmentation
• AI-powered product discovery
• Conversational shopping
• Guided shopping
• Bundles and complementary products
• Experimentation and testing
• Merchandising agents and automation

You will represent the merchandising and customer perspective when these systems are designed.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year, we should see:

• A clearly defined merchandising strategy for SwimOutlet.com
• Better experiences for SwimOutlet's major customer personas
• Improved category navigation and product discovery
• Reduced friction in major shopping journeys
• Strong collaboration between Merchandising and Buying
• A disciplined process for analyzing and improving site performance
• More effective product launches and seasonal merchandising
• Increased conversion and revenue per visitor
• Better utilization of inventory without sacrificing customer relevance
• Meaningful AI-powered workflows embedded into the merchandising organization
• Significant reduction in manual, repetitive merchandising work
• Faster movement from customer signal to merchandising action
• A site that increasingly feels like it was built by people who understand swimming

Most importantly, customers should be able to find the right product faster and feel more confident buying it.

Who We Are Looking For

You are equal parts merchant, customer advocate, analyst, AI power user, and operator.

You understand that great digital merchandising is not simply putting the products with the highest inventory or margin at the top of a page.

You understand how customers shop.

You notice when navigation does not make sense.

You notice when filters are missing.

You notice when an assortment is technically complete but confusing to shop.

You notice when the site is merchandising products according to an internal organizational structure instead of the customer's mental model.

And when you encounter a repetitive or difficult problem, one of your first instincts is:

"How could I use AI to do this better?"

You are deeply curious about customer behavior and willing to spend time understanding the sport, its participants, its products, and its culture.

Ideal Experience

We are particularly interested in candidates with:

• 5+ years of e-commerce, digital merchandising, site merchandising, or closely related experience
• Experience merchandising a large multi-brand assortment
• Strong understanding of e-commerce customer journeys
• Experience with category merchandising, search, navigation, filters, sorting, and product discovery
• Strong analytical skills
• Experience using customer behavior and conversion data to make merchandising decisions
• Experience partnering with Buyers or Merchants
• Experience working closely with Product and UX teams
• Experience with experimentation and A/B testing
• Strong commercial instincts
• Strong attention to detail without losing sight of the larger customer journey
• Heavy hands-on use of modern AI tools in their professional workflow
• Experience using AI to research, analyze, automate, create, or improve business processes
• Comfort experimenting with new AI tools and figuring out how to apply them without extensive direction

Experience building AI workflows, agents, automations, custom GPTs, or similar systems is a major plus.

Experience in sporting goods, specialty retail, apparel, footwear, outdoor, fitness, or another enthusiast-driven category is especially valuable.

Knowledge of swimming is helpful but not required.

A genuine willingness to learn the swimming customer is required.

This Role Is Probably Not For You If...

We want to be transparent about what this job is and what it is not.

This may not be the right role if:

• Your definition of site merchandising is primarily scheduling banners and changing homepage creative.
• You have spent most of your career executing merchandising requests from other teams rather than developing merchandising strategies yourself.
• You are primarily a visual merchandiser.
• You are primarily a content producer or copywriter.
• You are primarily a digital marketer focused on acquiring traffic.
• You prefer making decisions based on taste or opinion rather than customer behavior and data.