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Position Title: Assistant Buyer
Department: Buying office
Reports to: Buyer/Senior Buyer
Category: Exempt
Location: Valley Stream, NY
Position summary:
The Assistant Buyer assists Buyers in identifying, executing and communication long term and short term merchandise strategies through the development of plans to create compelling merchandise assortments that are consistent with the company’s customer, client and financial goals and strategies. This position helps control merchandising and marketing messages that meet or exceed sales, profit and inventory plans.
Responsibilities:
- Assist Buyers in selecting, sourcing, negotiating, pricing, planning and marketing merchandise aligned with business strategies and financial goals.
- Assist Buyer in the execution of all related merchandising activities including creating and placing merchandise orders, monitoring and tracking on order details, cancellations and necessary follow-up (both internally and externally) to ensure key shipments are delivered and processed and communicates any order revisions to suppliers.
- Review sales performance and makes recommendations to adjust plans.
- Liaise with visual team to ensure that all products are properly on sales floor for optimization.
- Participate in business reviews to develop greater understanding of how specific actions impact overall department results.
- Monitoring of merchandise reports, Open-to-Buy monitoring, stock analysis and other ad hoc analyses.
- Coordinating and managing promotional activities and events.
- Assist with vendor logistics and freight management procedures for assigned categories and products, communicates distribution procedures to field operations and assists with store setup as required.
- Gain a complete understanding of pricing strategies and stay informed on customer trends and what is selling and stay abreast of market trends, including new items, vendors, and price comparisons.
- Communicate with vendors for product/pricing execution and timely receipts.
- Communicate and follows up with retail management and operations to ensure that all established contract terms, concepts standards and product display standards and merchandising guidelines are being followed.
- Maintain detailed assortment plan for assigned lines and practices exception based management, identifying issues and recommending solutions to the Buyers.
- Responsible to ensure the effective relationship with vendors. This includes appropriate level of interaction with vendors in terms of both problem resolution and follow-up.
- Pull relevant sales, margin and price point reporting and make recommendations based on results to improve business portfolio.
- Perform the administrative & operational functions supporting a designated Buyer.
- Perform other duties as determined by management but not limited to the above mentioned responsibilities.
Requirements:
- Mandatory 2+ years Retail Buying/Retail Operation experiences within a Buying Department.
- Bachelor Degree or Equivalent Business experience is required.
- Knowledge of store operations, distribution and logistics preferred.
- Strong knowledge of and ability to apply retail math concepts, including elements of markup, margin planning, open to buy, and inventory productivity measures.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Proficient in MS Word and Excel (Pivot Table, V lookup preferred).
- Must be able to work independently.
- Results oriented and self-motivated with a strong sense of urgency.
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