Lead Planner - Outdoor Living

As the Lead Merchandise Planner for our Outdoor categories, you’ll set the strategic planning direction, leading a team of planners and partnering with the buying team to drive performance and profitability. This Lead Planner position will sit in the Home division and look after the Outdoor Living categories covering Dry and Green gardening, Hardware, Automotive, BBQs and Outdoor Furniture. You’ll lead and mentor two planners, building capability and ensuring best-in-class planning practices are embedded across the team. Acting as the link between market insights and product availability, you’ll ensure our customers find the items they need and love in our stores. This is a dynamic, hands-on role where you’ll bring your commercial insight and planning expertise to shape our category's success.

With strong financial acumen, assortment building skills and a real commercial mindset, you'll work collaboratively to drive optimisation and manage the product lifecycle process, whilst being consistently on top of performance.

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead category strategy build in collaboration with lead buyer.
• Ensure optimised implementation of strategy by actively trading the category and supporting team members
• Clearly communicate data, actions and outcomes, keep stakeholders up to date on progress, provide and receive constructive feedback
• Financial – build and deliver budget, working within financial parameters
• Customer – collaborate with buying team to effectively build a range that reflects the category strategy, chasing opportunities and managing risk to financial plan. Quickly identifying trade trends and taking appropriate action to optimise outcomes.
• Range and process - Lead the range review with the buying team. Deliver to critical path dates, articulate range decisions and impact on financial performance plan.
• Pricing and promotion – Manage markdown (clearance and promo) plan effectively within financial targets and market changes.
• Team – Lead 2x direct reports with clarity, integrity and accountability
• Take ownership of tasks, following policies and procedures, ensuring quality, accuracy and deadlines are met.
• Live the company culture, values and behaviours

Range

• Deliver product range, sales, and buy plans within critical path, financial parameters and budgets.
• Support and collaborate with Buying team to create and update product strategies to support long-term business plans.
• Ensure all product information is accurate and up-to-date using RPT as our sole ranging tool.
• Oversee and deliver range to optimise stock flow through managing entry, exit and sell thru metrics

Financial

• Build budgets that deliver to company strategy, customer demand and market opportunities.
• Manage future season OTB, reacting to trade, minimising risk and maximising opportunities.
• Create, oversee and manage Category Financials plans, planning stock flow to meet business requirements and reforecasting all metrics based on sales trends.
• Oversee the analysis of product performance and actions to improve

Pricing and Promotion

• Oversee and plan product pricing strategy as well as promotions opportunities, in line with company strategy
• Lead the in-season trading strategy to deliver optimised margin outcomes.
• Manage price and promotional impact to support budget, product lifecycle and stock flow.