Senior Divisional Merchandise Manager, Grocery & Household

Job Summary :

Accountable for leading multiple categories and category teams with the goal of delivering short and long term business objectives. Provides strategic direction, merchandising leadership and P&L management. Partners with suppliers to develop and manage assortments that best align to our customers’ needs. Through the collaboration of managing direct and indirect team members, leads the overall category management process, playing a vital role in assessing and making decisions that will affect business results.

Job Responsibilities :

• Provides leadership to develop category strategies, drive annual assortment planning, and build strong executional plans based on insights and vendor negotiations to optimize annual business results. This includes working collaboratively with a number of support functions including marketing, loyalty, owned brands, finance and insights to develop fully integrated merchandising plans driven by consumer insights.
• Responsible for leading the category review and planning process, utilizing cross functional resources and multiple data sources to interpret customer data and insights to make strategic recommendations to optimize business performance. Key to the role is optimizing performance around key business metrics including sales, profit and share, understanding how to drive different outcomes based off prescribed category roles. Optimal outcome is developing customer plans that helps Walgreens differentiate itself from the competition.
• Curate assortment utilizing consumer insights. Leveraging the outcome of category reviews, identify and recommend assortment options that factor both national and regionally local trends. Understand the category roles and align the merchandising mix to be effective in tandem with the company’s merchandising strategy. Partner with E-Commerce and Marketing teams to help deliver a more compelling Omni-Channel experience for our customers.
• Optimize sales and profit through pricing and promotional effectiveness. Utilizing our promotional tools and data, constantly strive to build more effective promotional programs delivering against profit and sales targets.
• Leveraging insights and basket data build promotions that drive profitable traffic for the company.
• Manage a P&L with an advanced knowledge of key drivers that deliver sustainable long term results for the company. Understands the full end to end business model and can identify critical areas that are driving existing issues or potential opportunities. Through this have the ability to analyze, mitigate and/or take calculated business risks.
• Lead and develop all vendor relationships and joint business planning for key strategic vendors. Understands how to prioritize vendors and how to optimize vendor funding and resources to maximize business results.
• Use strong negotiation skills to drive COGS reductions on an ongoing basis.
• Partner with retail operations teams to understand the store needs and success criteria for merchandising programs. Build plans and initiatives that are easy for stores to execute and easy to understand. Build consistent communication platforms to assist in store education. Understand and drive strategies that align to new, segmented store formats and clusters.
• Oversees and is accountable for determining the assortment and merchandise investment in for categories within span of control. Accountable for achieving ROI on merchandise assortment decisions.
• Strong understanding of the role of Owned Brands relative to individual categories. Acts as an advocate for the company’s brands making every effort to optimize growth where it aligns to category roles. Understanding the end to end process of product development and product integrity and ensure team adheres to guidelines that enforce process efficiency and collaboration.
• Will build a “world class” performance led organization through strong performance leadership. Responsible for accurately assessing performance of staff and team, providing meaningful and timely coaching and feedback to assist in performance reviews.
• Manages the development of procedures to ensure merchandise is available to consumers at the start of marketing events and maintained at sufficient inventory levels to support all events.
• Lead and develop cross functional relationships to ensure we work well across divisions and disciplines. Be a champion of a matrix organization, understanding how to build trust and partnership for optimal company-wide results.
• Develops business cases to secure capital when needed to support departmental initiatives including a full ROI/payback analysis. Assures the appropriate use of Corporate capital; verifies item exit strategies are in place.

• Bachelor’s degree and at least 8 years’ progressively more responsible experience in two or more of the following: retail, procurement/purchasing, merchandising, vendor relations, pharmacy operations, or retail marketing OR a high school diploma/GED and at least 11 years of progressively more responsible experience in two or more of the following: retail, procurement/purchasing, merchandising, vendor relations, pharmacy operations, or retail marketing.
• At least 4 years’ experience managing a P&L
• At least 4 years’ experience creating merchandising plans for categories, to include, experience with customer analysis, market potential evaluation, and goal definition.
• At least 4 years’ experience working collaboratively with cross-functional teams and managing staff, to include creating development plans, managing performance and selecting/recruiting.
• At least 4 years' experience negotiating with outside vendors, including negotiating contracts, prices, resolving service issues and reconciling differences.
• Experience with conducting and guiding analysis for market potential evaluation, pricing and promotions.
• Knowledge of marketing and promotional strategies and methods.
• Experience developing strategic initiatives which align with business goals and budget.
• Experience coordinating and facilitating executive management meetings.
• At least 5 years’ experience contributing to financial decisions in the workplace.
• At least 5 years’ experience of direct leadership, indirect leadership and cross functional team leadership.
• Willing to travel up to 5 % of the time for business purposes (within state and out of state).

• MBA/Master’s Degree
• At least 4 years’ of category experience/expertise (i.e. snacks, groceries, beauty)