Vice President, Merchandising

CSC Generation is the AI-native holding company re-engineering omnichannel retail. We acquire iconic brands and transform them with Genesis, our operating platform combining a Data Fabric, Automation Engine, proprietary tools, and shared services to modernize operations, elevate customer experience, and expand margins. With $1B+ in revenue across 13 brands, our portfolio includes Sur La Table, Backcountry, One Kings Lane, and others that serve as real-world innovation labs.

Reports to: CEO

Location: Remote (US or Canada);
Salt Lake City (Hybrid - 3x/week in-office);
Austin (Hybrid);
Toronto (Hybrid)

This role exists to own the full merchandising function for one of our portfolio brands — assortment strategy, vendor partnerships, catalog quality, pricing, margin, and the promotional calendar that ties it all together. As Vice President, Merchandising
, you will set the merchandising point of view for the brand so the assortment reads as curated, not aggregated, and you will own the revenue and gross margin levers that deliver the plan.

In your first six to twelve months, success means a rationalized catalog with clear SKU productivity standards, renegotiated vendor terms that reflect true cost-to-serve, a functioning vendor scorecard program, and AI-enabled workflows embedded across the team's recurring analysis.

This is a lean team. You will own a lot, move fast, and make decisions with full end-to-end responsibility.

• Set assortment strategy by category and price point — what you carry, what you cut, where the gaps are, and which adjacencies are worth entering next.
• Run continuous assortment gap analysis against customer demand signals, search and browse behavior, unmet demand, and the competitive set, and turn it into a prioritized vendor target list.
• Own SKU productivity. Grow the catalog where it converts and rationalize where it does not.
• Define the merchandising point of view for the brand so the assortment reads as curated, not aggregated.

• Source, pitch, and sign new drop-ship vendors. Own the pipeline from target list through to first live SKU.
• Negotiate and renegotiate commercial agreements: cost, margin, freight and delivery terms, return allowances, damage and defect responsibility, marketing and co-op funding, rebates, and exclusivity where it is worth having.
• Evaluate the true operational cost of each vendor — not just cost of goods, but ship time, cancel rate, defect and damage rate, return rate, chargebacks, and support load — and reset terms or exit the relationship on performance.
• Hold vendors to service-level commitments with a scorecard the vendor actually sees. Run quarterly business reviews with the partners who matter.
• Build and manage the exclusive and co-developed product program where it strengthens brand differentiation and margin.
• Represent the brand at market and trade shows and maintain a live point of view on where the category is going.

• Own catalog quality: item setup, taxonomy, attribution, imagery, copy, dimensions, and lead-time accuracy.
• Compress the time from signed vendor to live, sellable, well-attributed catalog. Treat onboarding velocity as a merchandising metric.
• Normalize inconsistent vendor feeds into a clean, searchable, filterable assortment, and partner with technology on the systems that do it at scale.
• Partner with Site Merchandising and Marketing so the assortment is found: category architecture, search relevance, collections, and the gifting and seasonal moments that drive the calendar.

• Own gross margin. Set pricing strategy by category against competitive and marketplace intelligence, and manage MAP and MSRP…