Senior Specialist, Category Development

Staples•Framingham, MA

About The Position

Staples is business to business. You’re what binds us together. Our Merchandising team shapes the products, assortments, and customer experiences that help businesses thrive. As a Senior Specialist, Category Development, you’ll turn customer, competitive, and market intelligence into clear recommendations that support category growth, product innovation, and smart portfolio decisions. What you will be doing: As a Senior Specialist, Category Development, you’ll serve as a research and insights partner for Merchandising and cross-functional teams. You’ll benchmark markets and competitors, analyze category performance, and translate complex information into actionable insights that help drive differentiated growth, sustainable incremental margin, and customer value.

Requirements

Strong analytical and critical thinking skills, with the ability to connect trends, performance metrics, and business results to practical opportunities and risks.
Ability to synthesize complex information from multiple sources into clear, actionable insights and recommendations.
Effective written, verbal, and presentation communication skills, including the ability to translate complex findings into concise business implications.
Customer-focused mindset, strong business acumen, and curiosity about retail, consumer behavior, market trends, and competitive dynamics.
Confidence managing multiple priorities, working independently within established processes, and escalating complex or high-risk issues when appropriate.
Collaborative approach with the ability to partner across Merchandising, Category Development, Product Development, Marketing, Analytics, and other cross-functional teams.
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Merchandising, Analytics, Market Research, or related field.
2+ years of experience in category management, merchandising, market research, consumer insights, business analytics, or related field.
Experience analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from multiple sources.
Experience creating reports, presentations, dashboards, or stakeholder recommendations that translate insights into action.
Proficiency in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting Private Brand, product development, or innovation initiatives in retail, consumer products, category management, or merchandising environments.
Experience using market research, competitive intelligence, or benchmarking tools to develop executive-level presentations and business recommendations.
Advanced proficiency with Excel and data analysis techniques.

Responsibilities

Monitor customer reviews, ratings, feedback, competitor assortments, pricing, features, packaging, and innovation activity to identify unmet needs, risks, and growth opportunities.
Analyze category performance, assortment productivity, Owned Brand penetration, hero products, redundancies, and whitespace opportunities to support category reviews and portfolio health assessments.
Research customer pain points, evolving needs, product concepts, materials, specifications, value propositions, and competitive design trends to support product briefs and business cases.
Develop competitive landscape reports, category scorecards, trend reports, executive-ready summaries, presentations, and opportunity assessments for business partners and leadership.
Maintain insight repositories, improve research methods and reporting tools, and share best practices that help teams move from observations to decisions.