ProspectBlue is partnered with an activewear brand client looking for a proactive and analytical Merchandise Planner to join its Planning team in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Merchandise Planner will focus on managing the companys sales and inventory forecasting at the SKU level to inform POs and strategic planning. This person should have excellent quantitative and analytical skills and be an expert in Microsoft Excel. The best candidate has strong experience in planning, sales forecasting, and/or inventory management, ideally in retail or consumer goods, as well as experience with reporting tools. This candidate should have exceptional organizational skills and attention to detail to effectively own the companys sales forecast at the SKU level. This candidate should be comfortable pulling raw data, organizing it into a digestible format, and communicating it to inform tactical and strategic decisions. Finally, the candidate should be comfortable creating and managing reporting around sell-through rates, velocity, and other sales KPIs.
This position will be located in-person at the companys Charlottesville, VA headquarters.
This individual will be working cross-functionally with the Merchandising Team, Finance Team, Production Team, and company founders.
Responsibilities:
- Update, maintain, and continually improve the companys E-Commerce bottoms up, item level monthly demand forecasts across all product categories
- Balance monthly item level demand plans against supply plans to accurately monitor stock levels and flag potential imbalances between demand and supply when identified
- Partner with Planning Manager to gain alignment on the open-to-buy plan and identify differences between the tops down and bottoms up forecasts on a product category level
- Collaborate with Merchandising Team to align on trend analyses including item/product rankings, comp items, marketing campaigns, and more to assist with forecasting
- Aggregate demand forecasts for each sales channel to calculate total company buy quantities for PO review meetings
- Complete PO upload template after each PO review meeting in a timely manner and pass to Production Team to forward to vendors
- Analyze historical sales data at a size level on an item/product category basis to calculate ideal sizing ratios for POs to help optimize sell-through targets
- Develop and maintain weekly/monthly reports to assess inventory levels against financial targets and create exception/ad hoc reporting to communicate business trends when needed
- Manage seasonal style master files to maintain data integrity and ensure merchandise is valued appropriately
- Attend strategic planning sessions with Finance and Marketing Teams to provide sales and inventory position insight on a product/colorway/SKU level
- Analyze return data to inform sales estimates and understand the impact on net sales and revenue
- Create seasonal mark-down and off-price proposals based on internal and external customer cadences, followed with reports to track sell-through
- Other tasks as needed
Qualifications:
- Bachelors degree required
- Minimum 3 years of merchandise planning or related experience, ideally in the retail industry
- Highly analytical and quantitative with acute attention to detail
- Expert at Microsoft Excel and building forecast models
- Comfortable owning and improving existing forecast models and Excel files
- Ability to work independently and switch rapidly between projects
- Excellent written and verbal communication
- Self-starter work ethic with a desire to make a positive impact
- Strong internal and external communication skills
- Ability to think strategically, advise, and impact the companys direction with data-driven analysis
- Propensity to go above and beyond and think outside the box
- Openness to change and new ways of solving problems
- Trustworthy and full of integrity
- Must be a team player with a no-task-too-small attitude