Assistant Buyer - Wovens Job London area,Greater London England UK,Retail

Location: Greater London

Our Role

To assist the Senior Buyer with ensuring that sales and profit targets are met through the development of a commercial, well balanced product range in keeping with Brand objectives. To take responsibility for a specific product areas/ranges and manage junior team members

What you’ll be doing Product Development

To assist the Senior Buyer and Senior Assistant Buyer in building a balanced, commercial and sufficiently innovative product range suitable for the needs of all business channels.
With guidance from the Senior Buyer and Senior Assistant Buyer to take responsibility for developing a specific product area/ranges.
To source new products and negotiate prices for sign off by the Buyer and Senior Assistant Buyer prior to selection.
Have some experience with open costing negotiations.
To propose new and creative ideas for product development.
Assist in creating initial product strategy packs for new season development.
To ensure that all product line lists are product sheets correctly maintained on the system in line with departmental deadlines, to challenge where necessary.
To have an understanding of cost price management, with particular reference to imported products and exchange rates.
To ensure efficient and commercial sample, fabric swatch management on the department across all our sampling requirements.
To approve bulk fabric, yarns, packaging according to brand guidelines.
To ensure that the key assumptions behind the critical path are well managed to ensure all critical dates are achieved. To flag business risk in a pro‑active manner as a result of process controls.
To work with the QA Department to ensure that any potential quality issues are resolved prior to full production, to identify and manage risk.
To assist the buyer and Senior Assistant Buyer in fit meetings alongside QA ensuring high quality fit and finesse. Fit experience required.
Previous experience working on woven product categories.

Supplier Management

To maintain regular communication lines with suppliers to tackle issues in a timely manner. To elevate issues as necessary to the Senior Buyer and Senior Assistant Buyer in order to protect this partnership.
To ensure that our supplier details are fully up to date, and to assess whether their capacity to supply our business and achieve growth/brand objectives is in place.
Assist the Senior Buyer and Senior Assistant Buyer in managing the supply base strategy, in a commercial way.
Manage the preparation of product brief sheets in a timely manner and with a realistic and commercial approach, challenging required content.
Manage the coordination and development of all samples and necessary information to enable selection meetings to run efficiently and to ensure deadlines are met.
To provide constructive feedback to suppliers after selection meetings on samples.
Undertake supplier visits and review meetings to improve knowledge of the business and to improve supplier relationships and manage performance.
To ensure that suppliers accept and adhere to our supplier manual and terms.

Commercial Awareness

To undertake regular store visits - ideally at least every two months.
To undertake competitor visits on a regular basis and feedback any relevant points for product development.
To have a good understanding of the target customer and emerging trends.
To consistently deliver excellent standards of customer service, to be pro‑active in seeking customer feedback from all business channels.
To understand the key sales, profit and margin drivers across the business and the impact of your role on these.
To develop a robust understanding of the weekly pack and sales by line reports, in order to propose trading actions, repeats and markdowns and to identify opportunities across all channels.
To work with the Buyer and Merchandising team to review line level performance and agree decisions on which lines to continue or discontinue.
To present best and worst product at meetings with evaluation on performance.

Analytical Support

To prepare appropriate analysis to support product, retail and Direct performance reviews.
To develop a thorough working knowledge of the D365 system and assist in the maintenance…


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