Director, Regional Merchandising

About the role

The Director of Regional Merchandising leads and develops the team of Regional Merchandising Managers (RMM) and Senior Regional Merchandising Managers (Senior RMM) who serve as the merchandising liaisons between Operations leadership and Support Center teams. This role sets the strategic direction, prioritization criteria, and operating cadence for the regional merchandising function, ensuring insights surfaced from the field are synthesized into consistent, executive-ready, and centrally governed recommendations. The Director determines regional and category alignment (“captainships”) across the RMM/Senior RMM team, builds operational efficiencies and identifies economies of scale across the chain, and continuously refines the team's governance frameworks and intake processes. This director role is accountable for building and leading a high-performing regional merchandising team and serves as advocate for the voice of Operations within Merchandising's centralized decision-making model. This role is based in our Deerfield, IL office and is on‑site four days a week.

Responsibilities

• Sets the strategic direction, annual priorities, and operating cadence for the RMM/Senior RMM team, aligning field insight with Support Center governance and prioritization needs.
• Determines and adjusts “captainship” assignments across the RMM/Senior RMM team — aligning team members to specific SVP/regions, categories, or strategic initiatives based on business need, workload balance, and individual strengths.
• Builds and leads a high-performing regional merchandising team; coaches, mentors, and develops team members' skills in strategic framework development, executive communication, and fact-based recommendation writing.
• Establishes performance goals, conducts talent reviews, and supports career development, succession planning, and hiring for the RMM/Senior RMM team.
• Identifies and implements operational efficiencies and economies of scale across the team's regions, standardizing intake, prioritization, and reporting processes to reduce duplicative effort.
• Builds and refines repeatable strategy frameworks, intake criteria, and prioritization models used by the RMM/Senior RMM team to ensure consistent evaluation of regional opportunities.
• Consolidates and prioritizes competing regional recommendations into a single enterprise view to reduce redundant or conflicting requests reaching merchant, category, space, and finance partners.
• Monitors team workload, capacity, and regional coverage, reallocating responsibilities and captainships as regional needs and priorities shift.
• Serves as the enterprise advocate for the regional merchandising function, representing the team and the voice of Operations to SVP/RVP leadership, merchant leadership, and cross-functional partners.
• Builds senior-level partnership across Merchandising, Space Planning, Supply Chain, Finance, Segmentation, Marketing, and Store Operations leadership to ensure regional insights inform enterprise strategy and planning cycles.
• Represents the RMM function within broader operating forums (e.g., leadership escalation forums, quarterly and monthly business field reviews with DSD and local supplier partners), escalating team-level recommendations for leadership decision-making.
• Partners with Support Center leadership to define and refine decision rights, guardrails, and escalation paths for the RMM function as the operating model matures.
• Reviews and approves executive-ready recommendations, business cases, and scorecards developed by the RMM/Senior RMM team prior to submission to central decision-makers.
• Monitors systemic trends and emerging issues across regions, translating pattern-level findings into enterprise-level recommendations and risk mitigation plans.
• Ensures the RMM/Senior RMM team operates within approved decision rights and guardrails, without independently establishing assortment, local pricing, marketing plans, or vendor budgets.
• Owns fiscal accountability for the team's operating budget and