BRICK EXECUTIVE SEARCH has been exclusively retained to recruit for a Chief Merchandising Officer for a high growth fashion retailer.
Overview:
The CMO is responsible for leading product and brand strategy to drive growth across apparel, footwear, and accessories. This role involves developing trend-driven, market-ready product assortments that align with brand identity. The CMO will manage a team, collaborate cross-functionally with design, planning, retail operations and marketing, and ensure cohesive execution of business strategies. They will also oversee financial plans and sales forecasts, analyze market trends, and act as a brand ambassador to ensure the brand’s success and alignment with customer expectations. The CMO will report directly to the partners of the business.
Essential Functions:
Category Strategy:
- Develop and implement a comprehensive merchandising strategy that drives sales, profitability, and market share growth.
- Align merchandising initiatives with the overall business goals and brand vision, curating a diverse and compelling product assortment that reflects current trends and customer preferences.
- Lead merchandising teams in identifying current and future trends along with potential white space opportunities to create a unique offering for the consumer.
- Lead development of global line plan, assortment mix and strategy for Category. Partner with Design, PDC, Sales/Planning, Operations and other Merchandising VPs to ensure strategies are clearly communicated throughout the organization.
- Influence others and gain alignment on strategies to drive business, style and innovation forward
- Lead business and creative decisions for final assortment and act as the key liaison with cross functional partners on assortment, visual and pricing strategies
- Work closely with design and planning teams to ensure cohesive product development and inventory management.
- Optimize merchandise assortment across store and e-commerce channels, supporting key growth initiatives and capabilities that evolve or grow the business within the channel, across channels, and/or across the brand.
Brand Strategy:
- Lead product strategy development including driving milestone meetings and executing product development calendar.
- Develop a balanced product assortment with a strong price-value relationship to achieve consistency within all business classifications.
- Conduct market research and analysis to identify emerging trends, opportunities, and competitive threats.
- Utilize data-driven insights and establish KPIs to inform merchandising decisions and strategies. Analyze sales data and customer feedback to continuously improve the product offering and enhance the customer experience.
Financial Objectives:
- Drive achievement of margin, sales goals based on financial plans for all channels
- Develop Long Range Plans with cross functional teams and Leadership Team
- Maintain awareness of competition relative to product value relationship and customer profitability within the category.
- Lead the team to analyze sales, competitive and market trends, and customer behavior to establish or update overall product assortment strategies.
- Clearly communicate business, margin, markdown, and inventory opportunities to cross-functional teams and leadership.
Qualifications:
- 10+ years of successful experience in retail buying or merchandising with at least 5+ years in a leadership role within an omnichannel retail environment
- Proven experience leading the product development process within a startup or emerging brand
- Successful apparel merchandising experience, in multiple channels of distribution
- Strong ability to build business strategies and implement shorter-term tactical plans that are cost-effective, efficient and realistic
- Proven successful leadership developing high performing talent and teams
- Demonstrated ability to problem-solve, develop creative solutions and influence and motivate diverse audiences
- Comprehensive understanding of the retail industry, macro and micro market, product and customer trends
- Successful experience with large scale apparel brands managing > $100M
- Strong interpersonal skills; excellent written and verbal communication including presentation skills
- Experience working with a wholesale channel
- Must be comfortable with travel ~20%
