Senior Regional Merchandising Manager

Job Summary

The Senior Regional Merchandising Manager (Senior RMM) serves as a regional merchandising liaison and strategic connector between Operations leadership and Support Center teams. The role is responsible for synthesizing regional customer needs, store-level execution realities, competitive activity, and performance opportunities into structured recommendations, strategy frameworks, and decision-support materials for central review and prioritization. The Senior RMM leads cross-functional alignment across field leadership, merchants, category teams, space planning, finance, segmentation, supply chain, and supplier partners to support execution of centrally approved category, assortment, pricing, promotional, segmentation, display, and vendor strategies.

This role is based in our Deerfield, IL office and is on‑site four days a week.

• Develops strategy to drive regional assortment planning by understanding customer needs and current financial performance. Shares customer segment’s data, insights and opportunities to develop collaborative solutions with key stakeholders in Merchandising, Marketing, Supply Chain and Store Operations.
• Responsible for analyzing reports to identify regional category sales gaps (vs corporate performance) and building regional plans to drive volume in these opportunistic categories. Serve as the liaison between corporate and regional operations. Responsible for all local pricing and marketing as established by corporate guidance. Collaborates with Localization team to drive synergies and create efficiencies.
• Accountability for regional subject matter expertise associated with each format. Ensures consistent and seamless merchandising execution within each format.
• Focuses significant time and effort developing programs and managing all aspects of regional vendors including negotiation of all promotions and funding. Develops regional vendor budget targets and service level expectations based on corporate growth targets.
• Obtains lowest cost of goods on all local products bought and sold into the region. May create advertising opportunities in the region through negotiations with vendors. Engages with top eight national vendors on a monthly basis to drive DSD category sales year over year and to align with corporate growth plans.
• Works closely with Merchandising management and regional leadership in establishing goals and objectives for each region. Responsible for achieving the budgeted market sales and profit goals for front end for the region. Provides business cases, reporting and score-carding to ensure decisions are fact-based for all regional activities. Executes national programs on a regional level.
• Serves as Operations/Local Merchandising’s first point of contact for assigned categories. Category responsibility may range from developing category strategy and managing category/region P&L to executing corporately developed plans.
• Score-carding regional program performance to determine viability for discontinuance or expansion for key local items. Determines if regional items have net profitability and ROI. For items with national expansion or planogrammed opportunities, the Sr. RMM uses the scorecard process to present recommendations to the Subject Matter Expert and Corporate category teams to be considered in accordance with reset/revision guidelines and timing.
• Responsible for negotiating with internal and external service providers (distributors) to secure resources and acceptable service level agreements. Manages opportunities where vendors are engaged for grand openings and closings.
• Assists Retail Pricing Coordinator to ensure effective management of regional vendors through catalog/pricing maintenance and the capture of all regional promotions and deals.
• Works closely with the business unit DMM’s to communicate local mix and programs associated with driving sales in all markets. Manages regional pricing as applicable based on corporate category parameters and guardrails.
• Partners with various teams to ensure successful outcomes. Partners with Regional leadership to develop and create regional Charitable Giving strategy. Partners with…