Category Manager in Reading

Title
: Category Manager

Package
: Upto £60k + Bonus + Private Healthcare and More

Overview
: This business I am partnered with acts as a distributor and scale-up partner for health, beauty, and personal-care brands. Their core offering is to help both emerging and established beauty brands reach thousands of retail outlets and e-commerce channels across Europe – enabling fast market entry and expansion.

Responsibilities
:

• Lead, coach and develop a team of four, including category managers and trade/activation specialists.
• Define the category vision, long-term strategy and market roadmap for the Beauty portfolio across both physical retail and e-commerce channels.
• Lead strategic planning for all brands in the portfolio, ensuring alignment with brand partners and internal teams to drive sustainable, profitable growth.
• Own permanent assortments across priority markets, ensuring the right range is placed in the right distribution to maximise rate of sale and margin.
• Manage the full product lifecycle – from onboarding and launch through ongoing optimisation and end-of-life decisions.
• Partner with Purchasing and Supply Chain teams to forecast demand, manage inventory, and balance availability with stock efficiency across active and discontinued SKUs.
• Define and own pricing strategy across Europe, ensuring competitiveness, strong margins and consistent brand positioning.
• Build and optimise promotional plans by retailer and market, ensuring clear ROI while protecting brand equity.
• Take full accountability for P&L performance, conducting monthly reviews, forecasting and budget adjustments as needed.
• Negotiate marketing budgets, financial terms and trade agreements with brand partners and retailers to drive growth while maintaining profitability.

You Are:

• Strong experience in category management, buying, trade marketing or commercial brand management – ideally within beauty or cosmetics.
• Proven leadership experience, with a track record of coaching and developing high-performing teams.
• Comfortable managing large SKU counts, multiple deadlines and cross-functional projects in a fast-paced environment.
• Demonstrated ability to manage and optimise P&Ls, including forecasting, budgeting and commercial decision-making.
• Strong pricing and promotional planning expertise.

Ready to lead with confidence and make a real impact?

Apply now to join a brand that celebrates individuality, champions fun, and knows that great results come from great people.

To apply, please email your cv to Lucy Lomas-

**Please note, due to a large volume of applications, we are unable to speak to everybody. If you do not hear back from our team within 48 hours, your application will be unsuccessful**