Associate Merchant, Men's

Overview

The Associate Merchant, Men's plays an important role in shaping and driving the product strategy for the business, translating consumer insights and market trends into compelling assortments that fuel growth and customer engagement. This individual contributes to the development and execution of seasonal line plans, collaborates cross-functionally to ensure product innovation, and drives operational excellence from concept through commercialization.

The Associate Merchant acts as a key liaison between design, production, planning, and marketing teams to ensure alignment on seasonal strategies, margin targets, and delivery timelines. This role demands a strong business acumen, deep product sensibility, and the ability to respond quickly to selling trends and hindsight data.

• Identify and rapidly react to trends in weekly sales reports and seasonal hindsight reports
• Create seasonal line plans to communicate product needs cross functionally and foster innovation
• Partner with marketing to execute seasonal stories through all forms of media and sales channels
• Drive quality sourcing, healthy margins, and on time deliveries in partnership with production
• Act as the cross-functional liaison lead to execute seasonal assortments from concept through commercialization
• Establish and maintain a reputation of credibility, integrity, and responsiveness with all internal and external partners
• Ensure all critical deadlines are met to maintain flexibility and maximize profitability
• Prepare seasonal strategies to all sales divisions and ensures product needs are met
• Understand key trends in apparel, technology, and store/web merchandising
• Drive customer engagement through product testing, market research, and interaction
• Support the execution of product rankings, store tiering/segmentation, and legitimizing SKU counts
• Partner with planning team to align on seasonal buy plans, allocation strategies, and markdowns

• 3+ years of corporate Merchandising experience required
• Strong curiosity, and passion for the vineyard vines brand
• Merchant planner business acumen
• Demonstrate strong analytical and problem-solving skills; comprehensive understanding of retail math*
• Team-oriented with ability to interact with partners across the organization at all levels
• Systems-savvy
• Must have strong Excel skills (Pivot Tables, vLook Ups, etc.)
• Strong listening, written and oral communication skills required
• Outstanding attention to detail and accuracy required
• Excellent product sensibility and ability to merchandise assortments in an appealing way
• Ability to react quickly with a strong sense of urgency
• Flexible and adaptive to changing priorities
• Able to organize and prioritize workload to meet deadlines
• Additional experience including combination of Buying, Planning, Product Development, & Marketing experiences
• Experience in customer and trend direction to inform both assortment strategy, and decision making
• Team-oriented with the ability to interact with partners across the organization at all levels

• We have a fun-spirited entrepreneurial culture filled with truly "good" people
• We offer a generous employee discount so you can rep our lifestyle on-and-off the boat
• We offer a competitive salary package, 401-K, commuter benefits, and paid-family leave, health savings, flex spending accounts, life & disability insurance
• We have an onsite gym as well as a financial wellness program to keep you active
• We offer 2 summer Fridays to take off in addition to a competitive vacation policy & holiday calendar

Equal Opportunity Employer
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