Category Specialist

Staples Inc.•Richmond Hill, ON

13d•Hybrid

About The Position

Our Category Specialists are accountable to meet financial sales and gross margin targets for their categories. Working collaboratively with their Category Manager, they will assist in sourcing and building assortments, developing promotions, setting pricing, and delivering best-in-class presentation to drive sustained growth and capture market share including supporting programmatic customer opportunities. This role will partner closely with across our Merchandise, Strategy, Planning and Allocation teams. At Staples Canada we are dynamic, inspiring partners to our customers and the communities in which we live. As The Working and Learning Company, we inspire people to work smarter, learn more and grow every day. We’re looking for curious, approachable, and passionate individuals who love finding solutions. If that’s you, let’s work, learn, and grow together. We are building an inclusive and diverse team Staples Canada is continuously working towards creating an inclusive and diverse work environment. We welcome, value and thrive on perspectives and contributions from backgrounds that vary by race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, lifestyle, age, educational background, national origin, religion or physical ability. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

Requirements

Post secondary diploma with a focus on retail management, merchandising and purchasing or equivalent experience.
Understanding of basic merchandising and marketing strategies.
Required to commit necessary time to fluctuating priorities and meet the demands of the position.
Minimum of 1-3 years of previous retail management, purchasing or merchandising experience.

Responsibilities

Working closely with Category Manager, develop channel-relevant assortments leveraging solid analytics, industry trends and vendor/brand insights.
Work with Category Manager on all line reviews.
Proactively seek out category insights from vendors and external sources of information.
Provide presales support to high value/specific customer opportunities.
Support programmatic customer opportunities that could include RFI (Request for Information), RFQ (Request for Quotation), RFP (Request for Proposal) and other customer requests.
Onboard and set up new SKUs by collecting all required content from vendor partners and following established set-up guidelines.
Set and maintain pricing, ensuring it is in line with pricing policies and strategies for the category.
Monitor integrity of systems data (AS400, Sunrise, Alpha).
Work with the planograming department to ensure inline presentation aligns with category strategies, keeping the customer shopping experience top-of-mind.
Work with vendors to establish effective off-shelf displays that adhere to presentation criteria and balance both inventory investment and sales forecast.