Director Merchandise Planning

Description

At Torrid we're committed to cultivating a welcoming, inclusive and diverse culture driven by a focus on open dialogue, empowerment, recruiting, training, development and retention. We believe inclusion of diverse backgrounds and perspectives is fundamental to our success.  

As a Director of Merchandise Planning at Torrid you will lead strategy and execution to drive sales, margin, and inventory performance across assigned categories. Partnering closely with Merchandising and executive leadership, you will translate enterprise financial goals into actionable plans, oversees forecasting and open-to-buy management, as well as develop high-performing teams to optimize results and support long-term business growth.

What You'll Do:

• Provide communication, development, coaching, and leadership to the merchandise planning team.
• Break out brand-level financial direction at the department level, balancing opportunity and risk to ensure the enterprise objectives are being met or exceeded
• Prepare reporting dashboards with metrics and KPI’s that measure the departments performance and provide updates.
• Lead the Top-Down/Bottom-up planning process, including in-season forecasting, pre-season assortment strategy and long range plans.
• Partner with Directors of Merchandising on high-level strategic frameworks for driving department growth during pre-season planning process
• Communicate and translate executive direction into actionable execution with direct reports
• Actively monitor progress against gross margin and inventory objectives and support necessary pivots needed to meet the financial goals.
• Develop planning calendar process leading up to milestone touchpoints and project manage the team to completion
• Drive Open to Buy process for the assigned division, optimizing sales, margins, mark-ups, discounts, promotions, events, and advertisement. Actively identifies business opportunities; revises plan as needed.
• Analyze historic and current trends providing analytical support to buying team.
• Partner with Allocation counterpart to determine allocation strategies and ensure proper execution.
• Create vision and direction to move the team forward with new methodologies, process improvements and industry knowledge.   
• Establish cross-functional relationships to promote best practices and process adherence.
• Foster teamwork and nurture a culture of inclusion, engagement, and growth while rewarding strong performance.
• Establish and maintain trusting relationships with employees and management.
• Partner with HR while provide leaders with guidance on performance management including coaching, counseling, talent development and disciplinary actions.

What You'll Get:  

• 8+ years of Planning/Allocation experience in a specialty retail environment.
• 7+ years related experience that includes leading a team.
• Advanced ability in Excel managing large data sets, financial modeling and creating tools
• Proficiency with BI tools, dashboards and data visualizers
• Prior experience with non-Excel based Planning systems (preferred)