🛍️ We're Hiring: Merchandising 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 committed to building compelling product assortments, optimizing inventory investment, improving sales performance, and delivering profitable growth through disciplined merchandising planning and data-driven decision-making.
Our distributed teams collaborate across Merchandising, Buying, Planning, Category Management, Product, Retail, E-commerce, Marketing, Supply Chain, Procurement, Sourcing, Finance, Operations, Logistics, Stores, Analytics, and Executive Leadership to ensure the right products are available in the right channels, locations, quantities, price points, and time periods.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Merchandising Planning Manager to lead merchandise planning and inventory strategy across assigned categories, channels, markets, or business units.
The ideal candidate will translate commercial objectives into actionable merchandise plans covering assortment, sales, margin, inventory, intake, stock levels, allocation, replenishment, markdowns, and open-to-buy. This role will balance customer demand, inventory productivity, financial targets, and supply constraints to maximize profitable sales while minimizing excess and obsolete inventory.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and implement merchandising planning strategies aligned with commercial, financial, customer, brand, and inventory objectives.
- Lead merchandise planning across assigned categories, departments, product groups, channels, markets, or regions.
- Translate sales and profit targets into detailed merchandise plans by category, channel, location, season, collection, product family, and SKU where appropriate.
- Establish annual, seasonal, monthly, weekly, and in-season merchandise plans.
- Develop sales, margin, inventory, intake, markdown, and stock-level targets.
- Build and maintain merchandise financial plans covering sales, gross margin, markdowns, inventory, receipts, stock turn, weeks of supply, and open-to-buy.
- Establish merchandise planning calendars aligned with buying, product development, sourcing, procurement, marketing, promotional, and retail calendars.
- Partner with Buying and Merchandising teams to establish category strategies, assortment objectives, product breadth, depth, price architecture, and inventory requirements.
- Translate category strategies into commercially viable assortment and financial plans.
- Analyze historical sales, inventory, pricing, promotions, seasonality, customer behavior, product lifecycle, and market trends to develop demand and merchandise forecasts.
- Develop sales forecasts at category, department, channel, location, collection, product, and SKU levels as appropriate.
- Continuously update forecasts based on actual performance, new information, market changes, promotional activity, supply constraints, and inventory availability.
- Identify forecast risks, opportunities, deviations, and emerging trends.
- Develop base, upside, and downside scenarios for sales, inventory, margin, and intake planning.
- Establish forecasting accuracy KPIs and continuously improve planning methodologies.
- Develop assortment plans based on customer demand, product attributes, price points, size curves, color, style, seasonality, channel requirements, and commercial objectives.
- Determine optimal product breadth and depth for assigned categories.
- Analyze assortment productivity and identify underperforming, overrepresented, duplicated, or strategically important products.
- Develop assortment rationalization strategies to improve productivity and reduce complexity.
- Partner with Buying and Product teams to establish new-product launch quantities and initial inventory commitments.
- Develop lifecycle plans for new, core, seasonal, fashion, promotional, and end-of-life products.
- Monitor product performance from launch through maturity and exit.
- Establish product-level sales and inventory targets throughout the lifecycle.
- Develop merchandise intake plans aligned with sales forecasts, inventory targets, lead times, supplier capacity, and cash-flow objectives.
- Manage open-to-buy budgets and ensure inventory commitments remain within approved financial parameters.
- Monitor committed, ordered, shipped, received, and available inventory against plan.
- Identify open-to-buy risks and opportunities and recommend appropriate actions.
- Reforecast open-to-buy based on current trading performance, inventory levels, supplier lead times, and future demand.
- Establish inventory investment targets by category, channel, location, and season.
- Optimize inventory levels to balance product availability, customer demand, working capital, margin, and stock risk.
- Monitor stock turn, weeks of supply, sell-through, inventory aging, availability, stock cover, and inventory productivity.
- Identify excess, slow-moving, aged, obsolete, and at-risk inventory.
- Develop action plans to improve inventory productivity and reduce aged stock.
- Partner with Merchandising, Buying, Supply Chain, and Operations teams to manage inventory risks.
- Develop replenishment strategies for core, replenishable, seasonal, and high-volume products.
- Establish replenishment parameters based on demand, lead time, service levels, safety stock, minimum order quantities, and inventory targets.
- Monitor replenishment performance and identify availability or overstock risks.
- Coordinate with Supply Chain and Inventory Planning teams to align merchandise plans with supply capacity and logistics constraints.
- Develop allocation strategies to distribute inventory across stores, channels, markets, warehouses, and fulfillment locations.
- Establish allocation principles based on demand, store clusters, historical productivity, customer profiles, inventory availability, product lifecycle, and channel requirements.
- Monitor allocation performance and rebalance inventory where required.
- Develop store-clustering and assortment-localization strategies where appropriate.
- Ensure merchandise assortments reflect differences in customer demand, location, store format, climate, demographics, and sales potential.
- Analyze store and channel performance to identify assortment opportunities and gaps.
- Develop channel-specific merchandise plans for physical stores, e-commerce, marketplaces, wholesale, outlets, and other relevant channels.
- Ensure online and offline assortment strategies are appropriately integrated.
- Monitor omnichannel inventory availability and identify opportunities to improve stock utilization across channels.
- Coordinate with E-commerce and Digital teams on online assortment, inventory availability, launch timing, product visibility, and channel-specific demand.
- Develop markdown and clearance strategies in partnership with Merchandising, Pricing, Buying, and Finance.
- Identify products requiring markdown intervention based on sell-through, weeks of supply, lifecycle stage, seasonality, margin, and inventory exposure.
- Develop markdown forecasts and monitor markdown effectiveness.
- Balance markdown depth, timing, inventory liquidation, margin preservation, and customer demand.
- Develop end-of-season exit strategies and inventory liquidation plans.
- Analyze promotional performance and incorporate promotional impacts into merchandise forecasts and plans.
- Partner with Marketing and Commercial teams to reflect campaigns, promotions, events, launches, holidays, and trading activities in merchandise plans.
Ideal Candidate
The successful candidate should have experience in merchandising planning, merchandise planning, assortment planning, retail planning, category planning, buying, inventory planning, commercial planning, or related fields.
Experience working in fashion, beauty, luxury, consumer goods, department stores, specialty retail, grocery, e-commerce, marketplaces, sportswear, home, electronics, or other inventory-intensive businesses is highly advantageous.
The candidate should demonstrate:
- Strong understanding of merchandising planning, assortment planning, inventory management, sales forecasting, open-to-buy, intake planning, allocation, replenishment, and markdown management.
- Proven experience managing merchandise plans across multiple categories, channels, stores, markets, or regions.
- Strong commercial and financial planning capabilities.
- Experience developing sales, margin, inventory, receipt, markdown, and OTB plans.
- Strong proficiency in retail forecasting and merchandise financial planning.
- Experience analyzing historical sales, seasonality, product lifecycle, customer demand, promotions, pricing, and market trends.
- Strong understanding of assortment architecture, product breadth and depth, SKU productivity, price-point planning, and assortment localization.
- Experience managing inventory productivity through sell-through, stock turn, weeks of supply, availability, aging, and GMROI.
- Strong understanding of inventory investment, working capital, overstock, stockouts, and inventory-risk management.
- Experience developing replenishment and allocation strategies.
- Strong understanding of store clustering, channel segmentation, and location-specific assortment planning.
- Experience managing seasonal merchandise plans, new-product launches, peak trading periods, promotions, and end-of-season exits.
- Strong experience with markdown planning, clearance strategies, and inventory liquidation.
- Experience partnering closely with Buying, Merchandising, Supply Chain, Procurement, Sourcing, Finance, Retail, E-commerce, and Marketing teams.
- Strong understanding of purchase commitments, lead times, supplier constraints, inbound inventory, and supply-chain impacts on merchandise plans.