Planning Manager

About the role

Having keen analytical insight to manage sales, margin, and inventory forecasting while mitigating risk to drive sales growth for North America stores and ecommerce channels.

Responsibilities

• Lead monthly sales, margin, and inventory reforecasting by category, identifying risks and opportunities to achieve financial targets across categories and channels.
• Analyze historical trends and in‑season performance to understand business drivers and provide actionable insights to key stakeholders.
• Own weekly and monthly promotional event planning, partnering with Buying to determine optimal discount strategies that balance sales and margin objectives.
• Review and approve seasonal markdowns, ensuring pricing strategies align with financial goals.
• Manage the seasonal purchase budget process, collaborating with Buying and Global Planning to develop aligned category and channel sales, margin, and inventory plans.
• Deliver quantitative and qualitative insights during business reviews, seasonal hindsight meetings, and investment reviews.
• Partner cross functionally (Global Planning, Store Operations, Outlet, Wholesale, etc.) to optimize inventory management and support business strategies.
• Oversee weekly product reporting for cross-functional teams, ensuring accuracy and visibility to key KPIs.
• Conduct ad-hoc analyses to deliver clear conclusions and recommended actions.
• Continuously evaluate and enhance planning processes, systems, and reporting to drive efficiency and improve decision-making.

Requirements

• 5-7 years of prior planning experience, especially in a vertical retail organization.
• Strong communication skills
• Able to multi-task effectively through excellent time management and organizational skills
• Strong mathematical and analytical skills, both quantitative and qualitative
• Advanced proficiency with Excel (pivot tables, vlookup, sumif)

Skills

• Experience using a planning system, with an aptitude to quickly learn system functionality.
• Ability to manage working in fast-paced environment.
• Drive for Results: Can be counted on to exceed goals successfully; is constantly and consistently one of the top performers; very bottom-line oriented; steadfastly pushes self and others for results.
• Customer Focus: Is dedicated to meeting the expectations and requirements of internal and external customers; gets first-hand customer information and uses it for improvements in products and services; acts with customers in mind; establishes and maintains effective relationships with customers and gains their trust and respect.
• Creativity: Comes up with a lot of new and unique ideas; easily makes connections among previously unrelated notions; tends to be seen as original and value-added in brainstorming settings.
• Interpersonal Savvy: Relates well to all kinds of people, up, down, and sideways, inside and outside the organization; builds appropriate rapport; builds constructive and effective relationships; uses diplomacy and tact; can diffuse even high-tension situations comfortably.
• Learning on the Fly: Learns quickly when facing new problems; a relentless and versatile learner; open to change; analyzes both successes and failures for clues to improvement; experiments and will try anything to find solutions; enjoys the challenge of unfamiliar tasks; quickly grasps the essence and the underlying structure of anything.
• Perseverance: Pursues everything with energy, drive, and a need to finish; seldom gives up before finishing, especially in the face of resistance or setbacks.
• Dealing with Ambiguity: Can effectively cope with change; can shift gears comfortably; can decide and act without having the total picture; isn’t upset when things are up in the air; doesn’t have to finish things before moving on; can comfortably handle risk and uncertainty.
• Strategic Agility: Sees ahead clearly; can anticipate future consequences and trends accurately; has broad knowledge and perspective; is future oriented; can articulately paint credible pictures and visions of possibilities and likelihoods; can create competitive and breakthrough strategies and plans.
• Building Effective Teams: Blends people into teams when needed; creates strong morale and spirit in his/her team; shares wins and successes; fosters open dialogue; lets people finish and be responsible for their work; defines success in terms of the whole team; creates a feeling of belonging in the team.
• Managerial Courage: Doesn’t hold back anything that needs to be said; provides current, direct, complete, and “actionable” positive and corrective feedback to others; lets people know where they stand; faces up to people problems on any person or situation (not including direct reports) quickly and directly; is not afraid to take negative action when necessary.
• Developing Direct Reports and Others: Provides challenging and stretching tasks and assignments; holds frequent development discussions; is aware of each person's career goals; constructs compelling development plans and executes them; pushes people to accept developmental moves; will take on those who need help and further development; cooperates with the developmental system in the organization; is a people builder.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401 (K)
• Paid Paternity and Maternity leave
• Commuter Benefits
• Disability insurance
• Tuition assistance

Pay

Base Pay Range $103,000.00-$133,000.00