Senior Buyer

**Job Purpose**: Ongoing category management in relation to purchasing, pricing and promotion of products to drive category sales, optimise and grow margin and to maximise income, all delivered through building and maintaining strong relationships,with a strong bias towards customer satisfaction.

**Key responsibilities**
- Ownership for the end-to-end journey of the product to meet customer needs in terms of choice, price, and innovation and to ensure profitability, specifically to deliver budgeted gross and net sales and margin £ and gross margin % for the category.
- Deliver stock budgets and proactively work to reduce aged stock.
- Create and maintain category and subcategory range plans to include forecast and financial data to meet customer and business requirements.
- Develop and maintain an in-depth understanding of the market, supplier base, competitors and changing customer requirements for all products/services within the category.
- Build, manage and maintain supplier relationships to enable the measurement of supplier performance to ensure quality, cost and delivery performance is maintained at high levels to maximise category profitability.
- Analyse category performance, customer data / insight and market trends to plan and implement ongoing range reviews to drive sales and profit.
- Identify supplier risk and develop robust risk mitigation strategies where necessary.
- Ensure products meet technical specifications, specifically in relation to drop tests, packaging requirements and products checks.
- Confidently enter total cost and contractual negotiations with current and potential suppliers, specifically negotiate terms, rebates, flexipay contributions and all product pricing.
- Manage and supply forecast pricing information for the relevant category for the annual budget and financial reporting periods as required.
- Oversee and manage, in conjunction with Logistics, supply chain delivery issues to ensure timely product delivery.
- Maintain a highly competent team by recruiting, inducting, coaching, and developing employees.
- Responsible for the development of all employees within the team including identifying development gaps and working with the Department Manager and the HR department to define methods to fulfil the training needs

**Person Specification**
**Knowledge & Experience**:

- CIPS qualified (preferred)
- Experience within a retail environment including a proven track record of being in a buying position.
- In-depth knowledge of the industry, being aware of industry Brand contacts would be desirable
- In depth knowledge of contract negotiations and experience of trading complexities associated with branded merchandise.
- Experience of managing a team
- Identify issues and develop solutions in order to meet sales, profit and budgetary targets.
- Excellent organisational and analytical skills