Lead Category Manager

Job description / Role

About the Company

6thStreet.com is an omnichannel fashion and lifestyle destination that offers 1400+ fashion and beauty brands in the UAE, KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar. Customers can shop the latest on-trend outfits, shoes, bags, beauty essentials, and accessories from international brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Hugo, Marks & Spencer, Dune London, Charles & Keith, Aldo, Crocs, Birkenstock, Skechers, Levi's, Nike, Adidas, L'Oréal, and Inglot amongst many more. 6thStreet.com recently opened GCC's first phygital store at Dubai Hills Mall; an innovative tech-led space which combines the best of both online and offline shopping with online browsing and smart fitting rooms.

Overview

We are seeking creative, goal-oriented, and highly entrepreneurial people to join our exciting and fast-paced team. We are focused on growing and developing a smart assortment of brands and providing easy access to fashion, with the best possible shopping experience for our fashion customers. Reporting to a Director of category management and merchandising, he or she will have responsibility for owning end to end of a group of categories, in areas such as vendor management, in stock management, and online content management. You will lead a high-performing team whose primary goal is to build and grow our business online, crafting a great shopping experience. Functional responsibility of the role spans the full spectrum of e-commerce including strategy definition, product acquisition, buying, merchandising, pricing, planning, project management, and marketing management.

Key Job Responsibilities:

• Strategy Definition: You will understand and have an in-depth knowledge of the retail and marketplace business in GCC, will develop and foster clear and comprehensive strategic objectives for the business and drive them through implementation.
• P&L Responsibility: You will drive the top and bottom line, optimizing all aspects of the categories P&Ls by delivering the right mix of selection expansion, smart pricing, efficient inventory management, margin improvements, top-notch customer experience, merchandising and traffic generation, and new product development.
• Improve Inputs, Manage Buying, Forecasting & Inventory Management: The team will be responsible for resolving customer needs, growing selection across brands, handling vendor partners, optimizing vendor terms, and efficient inventory management.
• Online Store Management and Demand Generation: Responsible for pricing, promotions, site merchandising, demand generation, and complete customer experience.
• Product Management: Drive the need for new product innovation, including site features and improvements as well as new sourcing solutions.
• Process Improvement: Invent and drive continuous process improvement and automation across our systems to scale.
• Focus on the Team's Talent Management: This includes effectively recruiting and developing the best and optimally directing the work and organization goals to deliver bold results.

A Day in the Life of This Role Would Include:

• Auditing inputs (selection, pricing, speed), sales, confirming with the team that the right actions to deliver inputs, sales, and profitability are in place.
• Meeting with external vendors C-level in top-to-top meetings to discuss direction of the business and joint business plans.
• Meeting with internal product and operations teams to unlock future projects and business opportunities, review operations metrics to confirm planned progress.
• Working through estimates and planning rounds with other teams and finance.
• Coaching and developing members of own team and others.
• Writing up and presenting business status updates and plans.
• Communicating direction to the team and auditing team metrics.

Preferred Qualification:

• 5+ years of experience in e-commerce/retail industry.
• 5+ years of driving process improvement experience, driving automation and standardization.
• Experience in internal and external stakeholder management.
• Sound business judgment confirmed ability to influence others, and strong analytical thinking skills as well as a consistent track record of taking ownership and driving results.
• Ability to operate successfully in a lean organization and be able to create a vision and organization that can scale.
• Knowledge of Excel at an intermediate level (e.g., pivot tables and charts, multiple criteria lookups, nested logical/IF formulas, data cleansing, array formulas, etc.).
• Clear evidence of managing and motivating a team, both direct and indirect reports.
• You are hands-on, highly organized, detail-oriented, data-driven, and self-starting.
• Strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive.
• English and Arabic (not mandatory) fluency.

Benefits:

• Full-time role.
• Competitive salary.
• Company employee discounts across all brands.
• Medical and health insurance.
• Collaborative work environment.
• Good vibes work culture.

About the Company

The Apparel Group is a global fashion and lifestyle brand conglomerate residing on the crossroads of a modern economy - Dubai, UAE. The mercurial growth in the last 17 years has been by acquiring a host of world class fashion labels from around the world - Nine West, Tommy Hilfiger, Kenneth Cole, Aldo & Tim Hortons just to name a few.

Today the group caters to thousands of eager shoppers through its over 1530 stores, 75 International brands and employing 12,000 multi cultural staff in over 4 continents. Apparel believes in turning dreams in to reality and we give everyone - our customers, our stakeholders, our employees - an equal opportunity to do so.

Apparel group has carved its strong presence not only in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia but opened thriving gateways to market in India, South Africa, Poland, Singapore, Jordan, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. Additionally, clear strategies are in place to enter emerging markets such as Hungary, Pakistan, Egypt and Philippines.