Anthropologie Merchandise Manager - Daily Practice and Lyrebird

Urban Outfitters•Philadelphia, PA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

The Anthropologie Merchandise Manager is primarily responsible for increasing the sales volume and profit for the Daily Practice business. This role involves influencing buyers to translate customer and competitive insights, along with fashion knowledge, into actions that drive category-specific growth and profitability. The Merchandise Manager is accountable for the quality of work produced by their team and for fostering collaboration among internal talent and external partners to create unique products that align with the Anthropologie shopping experience. They are expected to leverage their fashion intuition to guide the merchandising of their product categories.

Requirements

Entrepreneurial spirit: Thinks and acts like an owner.
Ability to recognize new trends, items, looks, and products early in their lifecycle.
Ability to understand the magnitude of an opportunity and translate it into an assortment and buy.
Creative thinking is an asset in recognizing and managing in changing paradigms.
Understanding of the Anthropologie customer and shopping experience, and that it is the final category edit for the merchandising assortment.
Ability to identify, gather, and assimilate information specific to the customer.
Ability to transition from strategic (conceptual and planning) to execution.
Financial acumen and the ability to manipulate numbers are critical.
Ability to develop and communicate a vision of the business that translates into bottom-line performance.
Ability to delegate and direct the daily activities of buyers and provide direction to the team.
Personnel skills to lead, develop, and coach people, recognizing that building a team is critical to the Company’s success.
Ability to develop partnerships with other functional heads.
Ability to collect, assimilate, analyze, package, and present information to the Managing Director for informed decision-making and measurable action.
12+ years of buying and merchandising experience.
Located in Philadelphia, PA

Responsibilities

Strategizing the growth of both sales and profit for Daily Practice, understanding annual category growth, and communicating sales potential to the DMM and Planning Director.
Driving bottom-up planning by prioritizing and allocating budgets across product categories after annual goals and seasonal business plans are approved.
Providing category-specific direction to buyers and reviewing detailed assortment plans.
Ensuring correct driver distortions are made to maintain proper fashion positioning for the upcoming season.
Bringing a customer and market perspective to the design process to ensure commercially viable final line recommendations.
Establishing and maintaining peer relationships with design and production leadership, exchanging information on market trends (customer, competition) and business insights.
Coordinating and providing information to the production function to facilitate production planning needs.
Developing and monitoring sourcing and production strategies for private label and market vendors.
Identifying marketing and promotional opportunities for merchandise categories and contributing to marketing, packaging, and promotional plans in partnership with the Art Department and Creative team.
Collaborating with the marketing team to create strong product narratives that resonate with customers and drive traffic online and in-store.
Determining the overall mix of market and private label product for each buying area to ensure a customer-oriented final mix.
Playing an active role in determining in-store product placement, having a point of view on priority placement and maximizing customer response.
Managing prioritization across all product categories within their responsibility, aligning with the creative team, and communicating to the field through seasonal overviews, marketing/visual department collaboration, store visits, and weekly operations meetings.
Managing their business categories in-season by synthesizing business analysis and developing recommendations to increase sales, improve margins, optimize inventory, and decrease markdowns.
Coaching and mentoring buyers to maximize market resources, margins, and product timeliness.
Facilitating the development of new market vendors, monitoring vendor lifecycles, and helping buyers understand when to remove vendors from the product mix.
Coaching buyers on using the market to react to business changes and refresh assortments to keep up with trends.
Providing buyers with regular job performance feedback and annual performance evaluations to develop them for promotable positions.