Associate Merchant, Skincare

Position: Associate Merchant, Skincare

Location: Field Support Center (FSC), San Francisco

Merchandising:

Our merchandising team is constantly building brands, starting trends, and developing entirely new product categories. These experts roll up their sleeves and advise our brands on the best way to bring our clients what they crave—and what they will be craving soon. Our product pipeline is so robust and exciting that many of the items that will be most in-demand in our stores next year don’t even exist yet. And our merchants don’t stop at selection—they bring the assortment to life through breakthrough curation and storytelling across our stores and digital properties.

Your role at Sephora:

As an Associate Merchant, you will be responsible for achieving financial and strategic goals of the assigned category and brands – including sales and gross margin. Reporting to the Senior Merchant, you will develop and implement department objectives, brand and client strategies, and visual presentations within your assigned brands in the world. In addition, you will:

• Develop and execute overall strategy for brand growth with new brands and product introductions, strategic expansion of current brands and exit of underperforming brands
• Establish and manage brand relationships, inclusive of terms negotiations (margin, testers/damages, space, training support, co-op, RTV's, samples, and more)
• Develop and execute assortment plans, 360 launch strategies and animations for a group of brands within the category strategy
• Analyze all elements of the category to identify areas of opportunity
• Interpret and communicate direction to team members within business unit and with internal partners to ensure that each initiative is developed and executed within the desired timeline
• Lead fixture/planogram planning and implementation with internal partners
• Plan promotions, launches, animations and marketing activities with variety of internal partners
• Demonstrate our Sephora values of Passion for Client Service, Innovation, Expertise, Balance, Respect for All, Teamwork, and Initiative

We’re excited about you if you have:

• Minimum 3-5 years retail buying office experience. Experience in beauty/skincare a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to develop product (inclusive of package design, formulations and copy) and category/brand strategies
• Strong communication skills, oral and written with comfort presenting and delivering to leadership
• High-level problem solving and analytical skills with good judgement
• Strong negotiation skills with ability to influence others
• Curiosity for category market product, styling trends, influencers/content, and competition
• Ability to prioritize and manage time effectively in a fast paced, collaborative, and complex environment
• Technical skills – MS Office (Excel- SASS cubes, Pivot tables, V-lookup, Word, PowerPoint); retailer merchant systems with ability to pull and merge data from various systems and reports to make data driven decisions
• The ability to travel