Merchandising Assistant

**About the role**

**Merchandising Assistant**

**Permanent**

**Up to £26,000 **+ Pension + BUPA + ShareSave + 6.6 weeks holiday + Hybrid Working**

**Southampton, Store Support Office**

We believe anyone can improve their home to make life better. From our Southampton Store Support office (SSO) we equip our stores, our people, and our whole business with everything it takes to help our millions of customers create a home they’ll love. Join us as a Merchandising Assistant and you’ll be a big part of this.

**Key responsibilities**

To support the Category Merchandiser and Assistant Merchandiser to deliver the category strategy through the coordination of a suite of activities including analytics, reporting, trading updates and query resolution to drive a profitable sales performance across all channels
- Work alongside the Category Merchandiser and Assistant Merchandiser to deliver a category strategy that meets our customer needs, including the collation of trading updates, reporting and insights or opportunities
- Support the creation and completion of suite of management information including sales performance, forecasting and margin reporting, highlighting any risks, and proposing solutions to drive sales performance across all channels
- Working collaboratively with buying, support the delivery of projects including range reviews, promotions and any ad hoc requirements including planning of regular project meetings; helping to ensure awareness of key milestones
- Work alongside the Buying Assistant to ensure the accurate execution of the replacement link process
- Work collaboratively with the Supply Chain teams to ensure optimal stock position and availability within agreed budgets
- Own sales trackers and sell through reporting for the category
- Support the execution of the trading plan by ensuring campaigns are delivered on time, in full, highlighting any risks to plans to the relevant stakeholders
- Support the planning and execution of stock exit across all channels to ensure mínimal stock write off
- Ensure correct information flow between Merchandising and Store Operations/Retail Communication
- Act as a point of contact to support both query resolution and feedback from stores and other key stakeholders including the monitoring of channels such as Yammer to provide additional insight to the team
- Conduct regular store (digital & physical) and competitor visits
- Support the merchandising team with general administration
- Display a willingness to develop and learn as part of the commercial function, taking on additional responsibilities where required to develop skills and understanding, ideally with a vision of progressing through the organisation

**Required skills & experience**
- Strong admin and organisational skills with the ability to prioritise
- Confident communicator, with strong interpersonal skills to interact with internal and external customers
- Ability to build relationships across all levels
- Flexible, proactive and takes initiative
- Analytical and numerical
- Good attention to detail
- Basic project management skills
- Intermediate Microsoft Office skills, in particular Excel and PowerPoint

**What's in it for me?**

As well as a competitive salary, our benefits package includes an award-winning pension scheme, ShareSave options, 6.6 weeks holiday, payroll giving, an Employee Assistance Programme, shopping discounts, colleague wellbeing benefits and lots more

As part of a great team, you’ll be supported to grow and encouraged to explore new career directions within the business and the wider group. And, because you’ll be inspiring great things for our customers and the whole business, you’ll do work worth caring about.