Director of Planning

About The Role

Vida Shoes International is seeking a strategic and analytically driven Director of Planning to lead the end-to-end planning function across our growing portfolio of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. This role is responsible for building and managing Open-to-Buy (OTB), demand forecasting, receipt planning, and inventory strategy across multiple brands and ecommerce channels — ensuring the right product is available at the right time to maximize sales, margin, and inventory efficiency.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and manage the end-to-end OTB process across a growing portfolio of DTC brands, all categories, channels, and seasons — including building, maintaining, and reconciling monthly OTB budgets at both the brand and classification level.

• Develop OTB frameworks and tools that balance sales performance, receipt flow, inventory levels, and margin targets.

• Lead the demand planning process, translating sales history, trend data, and forward-looking business intelligence into accurate product forecasts — driving cross-functional alignment across buying, merchandising, and finance.

• Develop and maintain receipt flow plans that align with OTB, warehouse capacity, and promotional calendars.

• Build monthly promotional calendars by brand in partnership with VP of Ecommerce and merchandising team to support inventory flow, receipt timing and demand planning.

• Build and refine size curve models informed by historical sell-through, customer data, and market trends.

• Build and maintain the seasonal and annual merchandise financial plan in collaboration with finance, buying, and executive leadership.

• Produce weekly, monthly, and seasonal performance reporting including sales, margin, inventory, and OTB variance analysis.

• Develop scenario models and what-if analyses to inform business decisions around receipt shifts, cancellations, and opportunistic buys.

• Present planning performance and strategic recommendations to the VP of Ecommerce and executive team on a regular cadence.

• Set and manage inventory targets including weeks of supply, turn goals, and markdown thresholds by category.

• Monitor inventory health against OTB plans and make real-time adjustments to reflect business trends, cancellations, or accelerated receipts.

• Drive proactive inventory optimization strategies to minimize excess and aged inventory while protecting in-season sales potential.

• Lead ecommerce inventory allocation strategy, including site-level availability, digital sell-through analysis, and online demand forecasting — with ecommerce-specific KPIs to monitor sell-through velocity, return rates, and conversion-adjusted demand.

• Establish planning best practices, process standards, and analytical frameworks that can scale with the growing brand portfolio.

• Foster a data-driven planning culture and act as an internal resource and thought leader on inventory strategy and financial planning.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in retail merchandise planning, inventory planning, or demand planning — with at least 4+ years in a senior or director-level role, including a proven track record in OTB management, demand forecasting, receipt planning, and size curve development.

• Experience planning across a portfolio of multiple brands or business units, with the ability to manage brand-level plans while maintaining visibility at the enterprise level.

• Extensive experience in ecommerce planning, with demonstrated ability to plan for digitally native businesses.

• Expert-level proficiency in Microsoft Excel — including advanced financial modeling, pivot tables, XLOOKUP/INDEX-MATCH, complex scenario analysis, and large-scale data manipulation.

• Strong financial acumen with the ability to connect planning decisions to margin, cash flow, and P&L outcomes.

• Exceptional analytical, organizational, and communication skills — with the ability to translate data into executive-ready insights and influence cross-functional stakeholders without direct authority.

Preferred Experience

• Experience in footwear, fashion, apparel, or consumer goods ecommerce.

• Exposure to planning systems such as Anaplan, Oracle Retail, or similar merchandise planning platforms.

• Experience with BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI) and comfort extracting and manipulating data from multiple sources.

• Familiarity with Shopify or similar ecommerce platforms and their inventory and reporting capabilities is a plus but not required.