Buyer/Planner Excel Specialist
AKIRA is a Chicago-based Women's Fast Fashion Retailer with 30+ stores across the U.S., and a strong e-commerce presence. We are looking for a full time Retail Merchandising Planner that is a true self-starter, organized, and collaborative to join our rapidly growing team.This role will be responsible for creating plans and forecasts for future merchandise buys based on historical buys, recurring buys and current inventory levels. Responsible for reviewing stock to sales ratios, responding to changing sales trends, and ensuring plan sales, plan markups, and plan markdowns are achieved by departments. Plans and coordinates merchandise flow-through. Inputs and maintains data in various merchandising systems.
The Role:
- Work closely with existing Senior Planner/PO Team Manager to set departmental strategies and achieve goals
- Develop strong partnerships with Product Development and Marketing
- Evaluate inventory position
- Create forecasts by season and offer that support Demand, Shipped Sales, Inventory and Margin plans per organizational timelines & KPIs
- Process, predict and analyze product demand including specific factors relating to product promotions, creative presentations and seasonality.
- Maintain and update special categories and product curves as needed.
- Re-forecasting & re-trending as needed based on fast fashion demand
- Understand over/under forecast; work with GMM/DMM and Merchants (the “Buy Team”) to make recommendations on strong and slow sellers
- Create exit strategies when replacing existing inventory with new items to reduce risk to margin and inventory goals
- Deliver ad hoc category analysis to Executive team to support special projects
- Manage the purchase order issuance, product delivery and product flow of plans from forecast to dock through supplier and internal stakeholder collaboration ensuring on-time delivery
- Category Assortment Planning
- Monitor Vendor and Product Compliance issues
- Create seasonal, monthly and weekly plans and forecasts for sales, inventory, markdowns and gross margin. Monitor performance and partner with buying team to develop financial strategies to achieve plans
- Initiate and develop actionable analysis to recap business by classification and subclass at a top-line as well as store level in order to partner with buying team to create strategies to drive sales and achieve gross margin profitability
- Manage and update open-to-buys
- Produce weekly reports recapping sales, inventory and gross margin vs. plan and projection by department, classification and by door
- Collaborate with all departments to encourage best practices and resolve issues concerning systems, products, vendors, presentation and inventory levels
- Cross-train within the department to provide backup support to others
- Identify process improvement opportunities and present recommendations to Management
Qualifications
- 2 years minimum experience in forecasting, merchandise buying, and planning
- Advanced Excel skills are a must
- Experience with direct to consumer, multi-channel retail, or eCommerce order environment a plus
- Experience in forecasting, planning and replenishment systems
- Experience working with both domestic and international merchandise manufacturer vendor base
- Experience working with fast fashion and/or mall brands
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
- Ability to identify/influence critical stakeholders
- Proactively problem solve and recommend solutions
- Strong communication and presentation skills: concisely presents complex information/ recommendations in terms meaningful to various audiences
- Makes decisions with limited information, but also able to create large quantities of data to drive business decisions
- Excellent optimization mindset - designs and develops models/plans to optimize decisions
- Knowledge of SQL is a plus