Retail Area Manager in London

Permanent - 39 hours per week. At Lakeland, our stores are the heart of how customers experience our brand. We are looking for a Retail Area Manager to lead our South East stores (covering stores from Norwich to the south coast), working closely with Store Managers to drive commercial performance, strengthen standards and deliver the warm, helpful service Lakeland is known for. This is a hands-on multi-site leadership role.

You will lead a group of stores, coach and develop Store Managers, and turn our retail priorities into clear action across your area. You will need to be commercially sharp, confident using data, comfortable challenging performance and able to build strong relationships with store teams and central support functions.

Your responsibilities include:

• Leading and managing a group of stores and their managers to deliver Lakeland’s strategic goals, achieving commercial, operational, and customer targets while keeping extraordinary service at the heart of decision making.
• Acting as the key link between stores and strategy, turning business priorities into practical store actions and feeding back insights that help shape future plans.
• Coaching, developing, inspiring and managing the performance of stores in your area, working with Store Managers to improve/enhance performance over all KPIs.
• Ensuring store managers deliver against retail objectives, manage their P&L effectively and develop growing partnerships with third-party customers.
• Identifying trends in store and estate-wide performance informed by robust data analysis and in-depth conversations with Store Managers.
• Driving improvement through area KPIs, managing by exception and using data-led insights to guide decision making and performance improvement activity.
• Effectively managing the end-to-end delivery of all projects impacting retail stores with a hands-on, proactive and organised approach.
• Working in partnership with cross-functional teams e.g. marketing & visual merchandising, to define and manage the critical path for new store openings.
• Building mutually beneficial partnerships with external parties e.g. shopping centres and garden centres, to drive footfall and sales.
• Ensuring stock control is in place and labour optimised.

Knowledge/experience required:

• Proven experience in translating data into insights which inform continuous improvement opportunities and drive stores’ success.
• Experience managing a large team and building senior level relationships.
• Multi-unit management experience.
• Experience mentoring and managing the performance of multiple staff teams.
• Leadership capability and managing others.

Capability:

• Able to employ excellent communication skills to coordinate and problem-solve with Senior Retail Leadership, Store Managers, and other parts of the business.
• Can effectively motivate and lead teams to accomplish goals and improve store performance.
• Able to problem-solve under pressure and balance competing demands for staffing, resource, cost and time.
• Can effectively project manage change and improvement projects and drive continuous improvement.
• Possesses an enthusiasm for/knowledge of Lakeland products.
• Has the capability to influence others around a common purpose.

Founded in the early 60s, Lakeland has grown to the extent that we now send out thousands of parcels a day from our Kendal despatch centre, and we have stores nationwide, stretching from Aberdeen to Exeter, with more in the pipeline. There are many benefits to being part of the Lakeland team, including a competitive salary, a group personal pension plan, 29 days’ paid holiday (including bank holidays) and generous discounts on our products.