Senior Merchandising Manager Franchise

Location: Via Milano

Drive planning and buying process for franchise. Lead and orchestrate otb planning, defining optimal volumes to provided channel ranges. Input on pre-season planning and steer in-season trading decisions to meet store stock requirements. Work closely with cross-functional teams including marketing, visual merchandising, allocation, planning, and store operations to ensure a cohesive and profitable merchandising approach. Ensure the achievement of market kpis and market guidelines/ strategy.
What you'll do
Pre-season planning & strategy

Implement pre-season strategy for otb planning & management in line with market financial targets.
Manage the merchandising process for franchise, ensuring the right volumes are bought in line with market otb plans and channel ranges provided by the retail merchandising team.
Drive space planning updates to ensure accurate financial and product planning.
Partner with the merchandising retail team to define and continuously refine a localized and differentiated market range, providing strategic input to ensure relevance across seasonality, consumer demand, and account-specific requirements.
Support the sell-in process by translating the go-to-market strategy into clear, partner-ready narratives and tools, ensuring franchise partners are aligned and equipped to execute against the planned buys.

In-season trading & execution

Lead market in-season trading, ensuring timely sales forecasting by product, stock intakes, and in-season markdowns for franchise.
Drive effective product flow to ensure store relevance, adequate stock clearance, and margin optimization.
Manage market seasonal stock position, ensuring the right volumes are available in stores and distribution centers.
Zone orderbook management.

Performance, analytics & demand management

Analyze sales data to identify opportunities for increasing sales and use insights to forecast demand accurately.
Ensure data-driven decision making across trading, flow, and replenishment topics.

Commercial & cross-functional collaboration

Drive the sell-in process in close collaboration with the partner manager.
Build and leverage strong relationships with cross-functional teams to obtain the information required to achieve business objectives.
Closely collaborate with senior district managers retail & franchise to drive best-in-class consumer experience and brand standards in stores.

Leadership, people & performance management

Set clear expectations and manage performance through regular analysis and timely, constructive feedback, including the active management of underperformance.
Lead and develop local franchise team members by effectively leveraging individual strengths, skills, and expertise to drive collective team performance.
Foster a performance-oriented working environment by motivating team members and enabling continuous capability development.
Act as a role model by consistently demonstrating high standards, accountability, and expected leadership behaviors.

Skills you'll need

Progressive experience in retail and / or franchise (sporting goods industry preferred)
Leading and managing diverse team
Proven experience in project management
Advanced ms office knowledge
Experience in (superordinate) market organization preferred
Consumer and customer orientation; brand ambassador and implementation oriented; understands all retail disciplines and knows how to manage them across different countries, franchise partners and store formats

Main requirements

University degree in business, ideally with marketing and sales focus or equivalent professional experience
Minimum 8 years of experience in retail and/ or franchise
Minimum 4 years of experience in leadership
Strong interpersonal skills: very good communications and negotiating abilities as well as high presentation, relationship management and facilitation skills
Analytical skills for business planning
High degree of commercial and business acumen
Strong determination and high initiative and pragmatism to the business
Fluent in local language

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