Senior Lead Category Management Analyst

About This Role

The Senior Lead Category Analyst will leverage fact-based analytics and customer research to develop consumer-relevant retail assortments and planograms. Improving the store model is a pillar of Ace’s long-term retail strategy, and developing the most efficient, productive and differentiated assortments/planograms for our retailers is a key element of this pillar.

• Leadership/Mentorship: Senior Lead Category Analyst will provide leadership, mentoring and guidance across all analysts.
• Analytics – Senior Lead Category Analyst will be responsible for development of assortment optimization strategy, execution of training, and ensuring consistent usage of methodology across analyst team. This person will also support the Department Manager in elevating the team’s ability to mine data and develop analytical insights.
• Data Mining and Report Building – Senior Lead Analyst will continue to enhance current tools and build additional tools that allow for deeper and more insightful data analytics. A key focus should be continual efficiency and optimization of Category Analyst tools to decrease time spent on mining data and increase time spent analyzing and aligning cross-functional team to an optimized, data-supported retail product assortment.
• Category Scope: Senior Lead Category Analyst will have limited ownership of strategic categories for Ace, but with less complexity so that they can dedicate time to implementation of assortment optimization strategies and team leadership.

The ideal candidate combines strong analytical expertise with exceptional storytelling skills. They can distill complex, large-scale data into actionable insights and clearly communicate these findings to both internal and external stakeholders. Success in this role requires the ability to define problem statements, craft compelling narratives, and drive impactful, data-informed decisions.

• Bachelor’s degree in economics, business, statistics, data science or related field
• 7+ years retail or consumer packaged goods experience
• Strong analytical and structured problem solving skills
• High degree of curiosity and structured problem solving skills
• Ability to analyze, evaluate and interpret complex data
• Confident presenting in larger groups across multiple levels of the organization
• Ability to communicate effectively verbally and written to various levels of corporate and retail management (e.g., manager through VP and store associate through owner)
• Experience with SQL, Teradata, Power BI, Alteryx, or other BI data mining software required
• Proficient in Microsoft Office applications (e.g., Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word)
• Knowledge of standard Category Management process and principles
• Must be able to lift 30lbs

• Previous management experience preferred
• Master’s degree in a quantitative or business field a plus

$102,900 - $128,600 Per Year

We live our values — W.E.L.I.G.H.T (Winning, Excellence, Love, Integrity, Gratitude, Humility, and Teamwork). Gratitude. Humility. Love. You don’t often see values like these in most corporate statements, but Ace is different. These things are important to us. They represent our commitment to the company, to our employees, to Ace retailers and to the Ace brand.

In addition to providing our employees a great culture, Ace also offers competitive benefits
* that address life’s necessities and perks, many of which expand and improve year after year, including:

• Incentive opportunities, based on role/grade level (rapid company growth over the past 5 years resulted in incentives being paid out at an average of 122% of your target opportunity!)
• Generous 401(k) retirement savings plan with a fully vested matching contribution the first year in addition to quarterly contributions and annual discretionary contribution (once eligibility requirements have been met). Over the past 5 years, company contributions (matching, quarterly & discretionary) for fully eligible employees have averaged 10.4% of total eligible compensation.
• Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision and disability – up to 26 weeks…