Associate Category Manager - Beauty

Job Summary

The Associate Category Manager is a developing merchant who supports the strategy and performance of one of our Beauty categories, such as Haircare, Fragrance, Suncare, or Cosmetics.

You’ll support the category P&L and contribute to the delivery of profitable growth, helping build customer-led strategies and bring them to life through compelling assortments, great in-store and digital merchandising, and productive vendor partnerships. You’ll develop sharp instincts and a deep understanding of the customer, using data and insights to identify opportunities and turn them into recommendations and plans.

You’ll work across the business, partnering with cross-functional teams to deliver results, while owning key category processes such as assortment analysis, supplier coordination, and merchandising execution.

• Plans, develops, and recommends sales, gross profit level, inventory control, and merchandise turnover objectives for the assigned department(s) and item(s).
• Develops and recommends merchandising, display, advertising, distribution, packaging and sales plans and programs for assigned items and merchandise departments.
• Negotiates buying contracts on categories or subsets of categories as determined by the Divisional Merchandise Manager (DMM) or Category Manager (CM). Reviews contracts with the CM.
• Analyzes market, competitive, and customer perception data, and provides recommendations to the DMM and CM regarding price levels.
• Reviews and analyzes historical and YTD category performance data. Recommends performance goals for categories, and manages category performance as assigned by the DMM and CM.
• Works closely with Store Experience and merchandise planning to build and review category insights. Utilizes data to make recommendations to Category Managers and DMMs on planograms, ROTO spots, promotional programs, merchandising assortment, forecasts, and other key category initiatives. Takes the initiative to elicit insights from data and recommend programs to division leadership.
• Develops an understanding of Walgreens and WBA private brands, including assortment and projected sales forecasts, gross profit level, and merchandising and promotional programs. Works with the Category Manager and/or DMM to project sales forecasts and gross profit levels within the assigned categories.

• Bachelor’s degree and at least 2 years’ 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 4 years of experience in two or more of the following: retail, procurement/purchasing, merchandising, vendor relations, pharmacy operations, or retail marketing.
• Experience working with P&L concepts – revenue, cogs, gross profit margin, operating expenses and income.
• Knowledge of customer centric retailing principles and the analytics of customer purchase behavior.
• At least 2 years of experience developing programs in merchandising, vendor relations, and marketing in the retail business.
• Intermediate level skill in Microsoft Excel (for example: using SUM function, setting borders, setting column width, inserting charts, using text wrap, sorting, setting headers and footers and/or print scaling).
• Basic skill level in Microsoft PowerPoint (for example: inserting, rearranging, hiding and deleting slides, navigating between slides, increasing list level, adding, centering and editing text, changing views, inserting a table or a note, moving objects, printing outline view and/or running a slide show).
• Basic level skill in Microsoft Word (for example: opening a document, cutting, pasting and aligning text, selecting font type and size, changing margins and column width, sorting, inserting bullets, pictures and dates, using find and replace, undo, spell check, track changes, review pane and/or print functions).

• At least 1 year experience of cross functional team leadership.

We will consider employment of qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Salary Range: $86400 - $138200 / Salaried