Senior Merchant, 3rd Party & Collaborations; PINK Beauty

The Senior Merchant, 3rd Party supports the Director in helping to build the strategy, to delivering the volume and growth expectations of the PINK Beauty 3rd Party Beauty Marketplace, through comprehensive management of existing third-party brands as well as the successful recruitment & onboarding of new brands. The role also oversees any 3rd Party brand collaborations. The Senior Merchant demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the connection between financial strategies and related merchandise objectives.

Utilizing their financial acumen and understanding of the customer, the Senior Merchant, 3rd Party is the subject matter expert in areas including, but not exclusive of, assortment and pricing architecture, brand(s) pillars and DNA, SKU management, testing initiatives and launch cadence for new brands, and the new PINK Beauty customer. The position collaborates directly with various cross functional teams including but not limited to design, merchandise planning, demand & deployment, production, stores operations, and visual presentation, to ensure execution of the accurate brand vision and category goals.

The role also collaborates & helps to lead any external 3rd Party relationship. The Senior Merchant must possess strong leadership skills as they are ultimately responsible for driving cross-functional communication and for motivating the team to be customer-focused, curious, and team oriented in their work. The Senior Merchant supports the Leader in prioritizing workload and plays a supportive role in training merchandising talent within the company.

Leadership

• Lead and demonstrate strong cross-functional partnerships with clear and accurate communication
• Lead and influence solutions-based thinking, conflict resolution and productive dialogue in cross functional and merchandising meetings
• Begin to develop leadership presence and cast positive leadership shadow
• Demonstrate ability to layer strategic thinking and business ownership on top of business execution
• Relationship building by demonstrating corporate culture & values of diversity, equity, inclusivity, open-mindedness, collaboration, and positive intent
• Lead and demonstrate company values of Love the Customer, Passion with Purpose, Better Together, DEI is Everything
• Consistently react with urgency while comprehending overall strategy

• Consistently demonstrate an ability to turn customer insight into actionable recommendations as it relates to assortment strategy
• Translate and apply customer and competitive patterning insights into actions that will drive the business and assortment forward
• Remain curious about the customer to better understand their current demands and seek to learn more through store travel and taking on the customer lens
• Partner across merchandising categories to connect dots on larger, total brand trends and patterns
• Understand the customer’s lifestyle by staying on top of trends, social media, and pop culture as it specifically relates to the customer, in stores or wherever they are
• Drive customer insight strategy via the internal teams and external focus groups
• Engage in competitive patterning to understand market trends, emerging brands, and to identify new product category opportunities for the third-party marketplace.
• Be the voice of the customer throughout new brand launches, partnering closely with digital and customer analytics team to understand all aspects of a launch: digital engagement with new creative content, revenue/demand drivers, how the customer is discovering these launches on VSL website.

• Responsible for executing the seasonal financial plan into a product assortment while preserving brand position and brand image
• Consistently demonstrate an ability to turn product insight into actionable recommendations as it relates to assortment strategy
• Accountable for key meeting prep with sample availability, style & color ranking, deck preparation, and ad hoc requests and analysis, always staying agile and flexible
• Responsible for ongoing trend analysis and reporting, inclusive of competitive landscape & competitive patterning
• Drive development of a robust testing agenda to identify and…