Merchandise Planner in Croydon

Join Superdrug Head Office - Make a Real Difference Every Day!

Location: East Croydon

Hours: 37.5 | 9.00am - 5.30pm - Hybrid working available depending on role responsibilities with 2 days working from home and 3 days in our stylish, modern and collaborative office close to East Croydon Station.

Salary: Competitive

Why Superdrug?

Passionate about Beauty and Health? Want to be part of an innovative, trend-setting retailer? Our vibrant Head Office, based by East Croydon station is a fantastic environment filled with hundreds of brilliant personalities. We’re a team that puts our customers and our teams at the heart of everything we do. At Superdrug, we aim to be the best in accessible health & beauty, loved by our customers for value, choice, friendly advice, service and fun. Our success comes from our people – they make the difference. We’re all about personality, we have fun, and we work hard to deliver That Superdrug feeling.

Here's the exciting bit… A day includes:

• Ensuring that department, business and cross-functional strategies are explored and implemented through category analysis and planning.
• Collaborating with and challenging the buying teams in making commercially-sound decisions relating to stock, that maximise sales, margin and income, whilst minimising risk.

Key Responsibilities:

• Planning the optimal range/assortment by store group, alongside the buying team and working with Visual Planners to bring these to life on planograms.
• Preparing key performance reports and ad hoc analyses to aid decision making.
• Owning and managing the range review process ensuring the critical path is adhered to.
• Managing the category stock budgets, ensuring the quality of stock is constantly reviewed and optimised.
• Effectively managing discontinued lines out of the business, minimising any margin impact.
• Helping ascertain and support the strategic direction for space and agreeing the associated budget impacts.
• Setting customer focused merchandising principles, ensuring fixture is right for the category & the business guidelines.
• Analysing trials and initiatives to provide clear insights and proactively suggest next steps.
• Undertaking various other tasks for the role, and where required, to support others within the merchandising team.
• Undertaking other business projects as and when required, liaising with departments including commercial, finance, data insights, marketing, supply chain, property and store operations.
• Generating detailed customer focused initiatives, in line with the logistics strategy and supports with execution.
• Listening to the customer and implementing new ideas and ways of working which are designed to improve service considering both Online and Offline.
• Ensuring the team prioritises actions which delight the customer/team member.

This job is a good fit for you if:

• You can work effectively and efficiently in an ever-changing environment.
• You enjoy delving into performance and behaviours/insights to drive strategies and decisions.
• You know you add value through collaborative working, and ensuring people feel engaged.
• You understand how important ‘right stock, right place, right time’ is to retail businesses.
• You are adept at looking at the bigger picture.
• You can easily adapt to new environments, and working with many different stakeholders.
• You get satisfaction through realising your strategies and seeing the results.
• Establishes strong relationships at all levels.
• Can manage tough/complex messages with all stakeholders.
• Role model collaboration to the team to exceed goals.
• Positive attitude towards feedback, uses this to generate initiatives to meet/exceed expectations, and shares feedback in a meaningful way.
• Effectively manages their team by playing to strengths and proactively addressing its opportunities. Ensuring everyone’s wellbeing & diversity is considered and celebrated.
• Feels empowered to challenge across different career bands and roles. Supporting other team members in shaping their work to do so.
• Proactively keeps up to date with market and consumer trends in their specialism and feeds this into department strategy.
• Uses data and insights to challenge the status quo to keep us ahead of the competition.
• Uses data to inform and generate new ideas and make decisions to improve on future plans.

What you’ll need to succeed:

• You will have experience in merchandising, inventory management, retail planning or retail analytics.
• You could be a Junior Merchandiser or Assistant Merchandiser looking to take the next step in your career.
• You will demonstrate good attention to detail and data integrity.
• You will have good verbal reasoning skills and the ability to understand and interpret the bigger picture as well as present to key stakeholders in the business.
• You will be numerate and analytical.
• You will be positive and proactive, and use analytical skills to seek solutions.
• You will have an aptitude to challenge the status quo, and figures that appear misleading.
• You will be team focused and be able to work collaboratively with other departments.
• You will be confident with the Microsoft Office suite - in particular Excel; and demonstrate an aptitude for working with spreadsheets.

Customer Focus: Be the voice of customers and orchestrate the organisation to live the brand purpose and inspire a customer-first culture to build customer love in every touchpoint of our online and offline platform.

Tech & AI: Helping your team understand when to use AI, when to rely on human judgment, and how to combine both.

Here's what's in it for you:

• 33 days holiday rising to 38 days with length of service (inclusive of bank holidays).
• 2 staff discount codes for yourself and a family member or friend.
• 30% discount on Superdrug Own Brand Products both in store and online.
• Hybrid working patterns available depending on role responsibilities with 2 days working from home and 3 days in our stylish, modern and collaborative office close to East Croydon Station.
• Company pension matching and bonus.
• We offer Stream - a money management app that gives you access to a percentage of your pay as you earn it.
• Being part of more! We are part of a group who work closely with Savers, The Perfume Shop and Three UK.
• We are part of A.S. Watson Group, the world's largest international health and beauty retailer with over 15,700 stores in 25 markets!
• Unrivalled Learning and Development programmes.
• Enhanced maternity/shared parental/adoption leave, company sick pay and pregnancy loss and support.

Come and be part of something special!