🛍️ We're Hiring: Assortment Planning Manager
📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time
💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior
🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are a commercially driven organization focused on creating customer-relevant product assortments, optimizing SKU productivity, improving inventory efficiency, and delivering profitable growth across physical retail, e-commerce, marketplaces, and other sales channels.
Our distributed teams collaborate across Assortment Planning, Merchandising, Buying, Category Management, Merchandise Planning, Retail, E-commerce, Marketing, Pricing, Supply Chain, Sourcing, Procurement, Finance, Analytics, Product, and Operations to ensure the right products are offered in the right breadth, depth, channel, location, price point, and season.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Assortment Planning Manager to lead the planning and optimization of product assortments across assigned categories, channels, stores, markets, or business units.
The ideal candidate will translate category and customer strategies into structured assortment plans, determining the optimal combination of products, options, SKUs, price points, sizes, colors, styles, and product depth while balancing customer choice, sales potential, inventory investment, store capacity, supply constraints, and profitability.
This role will serve as a critical link between Merchandising Strategy, Buying, Merchandise Planning, Retail, E-commerce, Supply Chain, and Finance.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and implement assortment-planning strategies aligned with category, commercial, customer, financial, and inventory objectives.
- Lead annual, seasonal, quarterly, and in-season assortment-planning processes across assigned categories and channels.
- Translate category strategies into detailed assortment plans by department, category, subcategory, product family, brand, store cluster, channel, market, and SKU where appropriate.
- Establish assortment architecture covering product breadth, depth, options, price points, product roles, lifecycle stages, and channel distribution.
- Determine the optimal number of SKUs, options, styles, colors, sizes, variants, and product choices for each category.
- Balance assortment breadth and depth against customer demand, store capacity, inventory investment, operational complexity, and financial targets.
- Develop structured assortment frameworks for core, seasonal, fashion, replenishable, promotional, premium, entry-price, exclusive, and localized products.
- Establish clear product roles within each assortment.
- Define which products should be core, strategic, traffic-driving, margin-driving, trend-led, complementary, seasonal, experimental, or exit products.
- Analyze historical sales, units, margin, sell-through, inventory, availability, pricing, promotions, customer behavior, and product attributes to inform assortment decisions.
- Develop data-driven recommendations for product additions, deletions, substitutions, extensions, and depth changes.
- Identify assortment gaps and opportunities across categories, price points, product attributes, customer segments, stores, markets, and channels.
- Identify duplicated, overlapping, cannibalizing, or low-productivity products.
- Develop assortment-rationalization recommendations to improve productivity and reduce unnecessary SKU complexity.
- Conduct SKU-level and option-level productivity analysis.
- Monitor sales per SKU, units per SKU, margin per SKU, sell-through, stock turn, weeks of supply, availability, inventory aging, and other assortment-performance indicators.
- Establish assortment productivity benchmarks by category, channel, store cluster, market, and product type.
- Identify products generating disproportionate sales, margin, customer engagement, or strategic value.
- Recommend increased breadth or depth for high-performing products where commercially justified.
- Recommend reduction, replacement, markdown, reallocation, or discontinuation for low-performing products.
- Develop seasonal assortment plans aligned with buying calendars, product-development timelines, supplier lead times, launch schedules, promotional calendars, and peak trading periods.
- Build assortment plans for Spring/Summer, Autumn/Winter, holiday periods, promotional events, major launches, and other relevant trading seasons.
- Establish seasonal option counts and product-depth targets.
- Determine appropriate carryover versus newness ratios.
- Establish newness, core, and seasonal-product balance within each category.
- Analyze previous-season performance and use insights to inform future assortment decisions.
- Conduct post-season reviews and incorporate lessons learned into subsequent planning cycles.
- Develop store-cluster assortment strategies.
- Segment stores according to sales productivity, customer demographics, location, format, size, climate, market characteristics, and other relevant factors.
- Determine assortment breadth and depth by store cluster.
- Define core and localized products for different store groups.
- Develop store-specific assortment recommendations where justified by demand and commercial opportunity.
- Optimize assortments for flagship, standard, compact, outlet, mall, high-street, travel-retail, or other store formats where relevant.
- Consider store capacity, fixture availability, selling space, product presentation, operational complexity, and customer expectations when determining assortments.
- Coordinate assortment decisions with Space Planning and Visual Merchandising teams where appropriate.
- Analyze sales productivity relative to available selling space.
- Recommend assortment changes to improve sales and margin productivity per square meter or selling-space unit.
- Develop channel-specific assortment plans.
- Determine appropriate product breadth and depth for physical stores, e-commerce, marketplaces, wholesale, outlets, and other sales channels.
- Develop omnichannel assortment strategies that maximize customer choice while controlling inventory duplication and working-capital exposure.
- Identify opportunities to extend assortment breadth digitally beyond physical-store limitations.
- Coordinate with E-commerce teams on online-only products, long-tail assortment, online exclusives, product availability, and digital launch timing.
- Develop marketplace-specific assortment strategies where relevant.
- Ensure assortment plans are aligned with fulfillment, warehousing, and logistics capabilities.
- Develop price-point and product-architecture plans within each category.
- Identify gaps in entry, mid, premium, luxury, or other relevant price segments.
- Establish appropriate product count and depth by price point.
Ideal Candidate
The successful candidate should have experience in assortment planning, merchandise planning, merchandising, category planning, range planning, retail planning, buying, product planning, or related fields.
Experience in fashion, beauty, luxury, consumer goods, department stores, specialty retail, grocery, e-commerce, marketplaces, sportswear, home, electronics, or other SKU-intensive businesses is highly advantageous.
The candidate should demonstrate:
- Strong understanding of assortment planning, range architecture, SKU management, product breadth and depth, option planning, and product lifecycle management.
- Proven experience developing assortments across multiple categories, stores, channels, markets, or regions.
- Strong ability to translate commercial and customer strategies into detailed assortment plans.
- Experience determining SKU counts, option counts, product breadth, product depth, and store/channel coverage.
- Strong understanding of core, seasonal, fashion, replenishable, promotional, premium, localized, and exclusive product roles.