Merchandise Planner

BuyWander•Seattle, WA

2d•$70,000 - $100,000•Onsite

About The Position

At BuyWander, the Merchandise Planner is the financial engine behind every buying decision we make. This role owns how much we buy, for which market, and at what expected return, and holds that standard even when senior leaders want to push past it. This is not traditional replenishment planning. Every truckload is a one-time decision with a one-time recovery outcome, and once it is bought, we live with it. The Merchandise Planner serves as the primary source of financial discipline in our buying process, setting the inventory envelope each market can absorb, forecasting what each load should return, and grading every source on what it actually delivered. This person works closely with the VP of Merchandising, Pricing, Transportation, and Finance to ensure every purchase is grounded in data and every market operates within a published plan.

Requirements

3 or more years in merchandise planning, inventory planning, revenue or margin analytics, or a comparable analytical role with real financial accountability.
Strong SQL skills and advanced spreadsheet modeling.
Experience building and maintaining reporting in a BI tool (we use Metabase).
Comfort working in an internally built operating system rather than off-the-shelf software. Our inventory and manifest data lives in Chuck, our own platform.
The judgment to translate messy, incomplete manifest data into a defensible buy recommendation.
The confidence and communication skills to hold a position with senior stakeholders when the numbers do not support a purchase.
Fluency with AI tooling such as Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to build analyses and reporting faster, paired with the discipline to verify what it produces.

Nice To Haves

Experience in liquidation, off-price, resale, or auction marketplace environments.
Prior ownership of an open-to-buy or comparable inventory budget process.
Multi-location retail planning or allocation experience.

Responsibilities

Set and maintain a monthly open-to-buy budget for each market, derived from its actual clearance rate, processing capacity, and contribution margin goal.
Gate proposed purchases against that budget and surface early when a market is trending over-inventoried or under-supplied.
Build the weekly buying plan covering target volume, product mix, and size distribution by market that the buying team executes against.
Evaluate inbound truckload manifests before purchase: product mix, total MSRP, size and category distribution, expected recovery rate, and estimated handling cost per item.
Assign every load to the market best positioned to clear it, balancing capacity, local demand, and current inventory position.
Set an expected revenue and margin forecast for each load at the point of purchase so performance can be measured against it while the load is still selling through.
Own the monthly source scorecard covering landed margin per truck, recovery rate, return rate, and handling cost by inventory source, with clear keep, renegotiate, or exit recommendations.
Track actual versus forecast recovery on every load and investigate material variances, partnering with Operations where the gap points to processing or inventory control issues.
Reduce the share of items that sell below their handling break-even through better mix targeting and source selection.
Work daily with the VP of Merchandising and the Buyer, providing the data-driven requirements and constraints that shape what gets purchased.
Partner with the Pricing Analyst on manifest data quality and load-level performance reporting.
Coordinate with Transportation on how inbound flow aligns with each market's receiving and processing capacity.
Work with Finance on margin attribution and market-level P&L targets.
Own the open-to-buy for each of our seven markets and hold the line when a market cannot absorb more inventory.
Evaluate inbound truckload manifests and produce a buy recommendation backed by recovery rate, margin, and capacity data.
Publish a monthly source scorecard with evidence-based keep, renegotiate, and exit recommendations.
Set a recovery forecast for every load at the point of purchase and track actual performance against it.
Investigate material variances between forecast and actual recovery and surface findings to Operations and leadership.
Build and maintain reporting in Metabase that gives the buying team and leadership visibility into inventory health by market.