Associate Planner - WSS

Overview

This role will be hybrid in office three days a week at our WSS Corporate office in Gardena, CA.

The Associate Merchandise Planner supports inventory, sales, and margin planning for assigned apparel and footwear categories s role focuses on reporting, analysis, forecasting support, and inventory management to ensure product is positioned appropriately by style, color, size, and channel. The ideal candidate is analytical, Excel-savvy, curious about consumer behavior, and motivated to build a long-term career in retail planning.

• Assist in building seasonal and weekly plans across departments, classes, and key items.
• Update weekly sales, inventory, margin, and receipt forecasts.
• Support pre-season planning tools (size curves, flow calendars, category targets).
• Maintain and update buy meeting tools, hindsight documents, and assortment productivity trackers.

• Monitor inventory levels, backorders, replenishment needs, and in-season size availability.
• Assist with size, color, and store/channel productivity reporting.
• Track deliveries, PO receipts, launch calendars, and selling velocity by product tier (fashion, core, seasonal, replenishment).
• Identify early risks such as out-of-stocks, aging inventory, or size imbalance and elevate concerns to planner.

• Produce weekly selling reports showing sales trends, WOS, sell-through and margin performance.
• Analyze SKU‑level performance by size curve, silhouette, seasonality, and fashion vs. core classification.
• Support post‑season hindsight recaps, including lessons learned for future investments.

• Partner with Buying for assortment and key item understanding.
• Work closely with Allocation to align inventory with store/channel demand.
• Collaborate with Supply Chain on delivery flow, lead time shifts, and vendor communication.
• Attend line reviews, buy meetings, and business recap sessions.

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Merchandising, Analytics, Finance, Economics, or related field.
• 0–2+ years of experience in planning, allocation, retail analytics, supply chain, or relevant internship.
• Strong analytical thinking and proficiency in Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP required).
• Knowledge of retail math, basic forecasting concepts, and SKU‑level analysis.
• Experience with planning tools a plus (JDA/Blue Yonder, Anaplan, Oracle, SAP, BI dashboards).