Director of Planning - Wholesale

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the strategic financial objectives through accurate and proactive management and forecasting of sales, margin, and inventory levels to achieve targets across wholesale retail partner accounts.
• Build annual and long-range plans in partnership with the VP of Planning to support growth and development while advancing brand and distribution initiatives.
• Manage the open-to-buy process, providing top-down guidance and directional recommendations around key inventory and investment decisions.
• Develop and maintain rolling 12-18-month top-down and bottoms-up plans for unit and dollar sales volume across wholesale partner accounts.
• Oversee inventory ladder management and sku-level projections on a weekly basis for core styles and lead monthly reviews and buys with merchandising and production to protect never-out-of-stock positions on key items.
• Engage directly with external wholesale retail partners as needed across buying, planning, and merchant teams to align on assortment productivity, inventory positioning, replenishment opportunities, and sell-through performance.
• Provide high-level analysis, business reports, and qualitative, actionable feedback and recommendations to senior leadership, including contributions to quarterly hindsight and investment reviews.
• Develop and share merchandise analysis to inform and guide decision making, including upcoming buys, promotional activities, external partner sell-through, current opportunities, and risk management scenarios.
• Partner with merchandising on the selection of core items, timing, and quantity of new and existing product to flow to wholesale partners, balancing inventory across the channel to support sales targets and improve inventory turns.
• Analyze the impact of new collection introductions, manage the core replenishment program forecast rationale, and track performance against forecast across all partner accounts.
• Collaborate with wholesale and DTC planning partners to maximize inventory turns and revenue by reviewing inventory weekly and making critical decisions to optimize inventory positioning across channels.
• Build and maintain effective working relationships across cross-functional teams, including Merchandising, Production, Wholesale, Analytics, and Marketing with a particular emphasis on external retail partner engagement.
• Drive planning process improvements, standardizations, and best practices built to accommodate the unique complexity of planning operating models.
• Oversee the career and skill development of direct reports as the team grows.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• 10+ years of analytical experience in merchandise planning, inventory management, or wholesale planning.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience.
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel required, including v-lookups, pivot tables, logic formulas, and basic macros.
• Familiarity or experience with replenishment planning, ladder planning, and open-to-buy management.
• Deep understanding of how to use data to drive commercial decisions, including retail math, sell-through analysis, and inventory productivity metrics.
• Experience with wholesale distribution dynamics, account planning, and external retail partner engagement.
• Previous experience with business intelligence and reporting tools such as Looker, NetSuite, Google Analytics, Shopify, or similar platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to build and improve planning processes in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
• Strong organizational and time management skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities under tight deadlines.
• Comfort with ambiguity and genuine enthusiasm for building new tools, processes, and partnerships.