Category Manager

The Category Manager is responsible for managing the performance, development, go-to-market execution, assortment strategy, activations, and brand relationships for an assigned Korea Town category, such as Skincare, Makeup, or Hair & Body.

Reporting to the Category Director, the Category Manager acts as the main day-to-day category contact for brands and vendors, specifically for matters related to launch planning, marketing alignment, activations, collaborations, assortment management, novelties, storytelling, and ongoing commercial growth.

The role works cross-functionally with all internal departments and stakeholders to ensure each brand launch and category initiative is commercially strong, clearly prioritized, well-coordinated, analytically informed, and aligned with Korea Town’s overall strategy.

The Category Manager is expected to run the assigned category with a strong trading mindset: tracking performance, identifying risks and opportunities, translating insights into action, and ensuring the category remains trend-led, differentiated, commercially productive, and execution-ready.

• Manage the development and performance of an assigned Korea Town category.
• Translate the overall Korea Town strategy into category-specific plans, priorities, launches, and activations.
• Recommend category priorities, hero SKUs, focus brands, product pushes, commercial opportunities, and corrective action plans.
• Monitor and analyze performance at category, brand, SKU, launch, campaign, and channel level. Identify risks, opportunities, and corrective actions.
• Prepare regular category updates, insights, and recommendations. Ensure category decisions are supported by data, market insight, customer behavior, brand priorities, and commercial objectives.
• Support the positioning of Korea Town as a leading destination for Korean beauty through strong curation, newness, storytelling, and execution. Monitor Korean and Asian beauty trends relevant to the assigned category.
• Identify emerging product trends, ingredients, formats, claims, routines, packaging innovations, social trends, and consumer behaviors.
• Build and maintain a category novelties pipeline by brand, sub‑category, and launch timing. Identify opportunities for exclusive launches, limited editions, collaborations, and differentiated product concepts.
• Monitor competitor activity, viral products, customer feedback, reviews, and local demand signals. Translate market, customer, and competitor insights into assortment, launch, campaign, education, and activation recommendations.

• Act as the main day‑to‑day contact for assigned brands and vendors. Manage ongoing communication with assigned brands and vendors and build strong brand relationships focused on launches, activations, visibility, newness, collaboration, and growth.
• Work with brands to secure product information, training content, launch support, activation participation, campaign assets, and collaboration opportunities.
• Recommend and implement action plans for brand growth opportunities and upscale strategic partnership, exclusivity, investment, or risk topics.
• Coordinate with the Purchasing team where brand discussions impact stock, orders, replenishment, samples, GWPs, FOCs, or operational requirements.
• Ensure brand communication is commercially focused, structured, and aligned with Korea Town’s priorities.

• Lead and execute go‑to‑market planning for assigned brands within the category.
• Coordinate with all internal stakeholders and brand partners to build launch plans covering launch timing, hero SKUs, storytelling angles, activation ideas, marketing support, channel priorities, internal requirements, and expected commercial outcomes.
• Ensure all brand launches have clear commercial objectives, product priorities, visibility requirements, channel plans, and performance expectations.
• Conduct post‑launch reviews to capture learnings, performance results, and next‑step recommendations.
• Define and manage assigned‑category launch readiness checkpoints in coordination with relevant teams.
• En…