Field Merchandising Manager

Start: 8th Jan

Location: Remote, must be based in UK

Length: 12 months

Rate: £365PD - £400PD PAYE (eq. to £425-465PD)

Engagement: Inside IR35 - PAYE via Trust in Soda

Our client, one of the biggest tech giants globally, are looking for a Field Merchandising Manager that is fluent in French and English. This person will be responsible for planning, communicating, executing, and reporting on the installation and maintenance of the Physical Fixture merchandising programs across all existing and future 3rd party retailer partners within primarily the France and Spain regions and potentially beyond. This role plays an instrumental part in contributing to the vision for global customers to find, learn and experience products through physical retail.

The primary role of the Field Merchandising Manager is to ensure that all field merchandising components including fixtures, demo units, graphics and display technologies are operating and functioning properly, as well as maintained to our standards. The role is execution oriented and requires experience in managing external vendors for execution and is focused on planning, managing, and executing large programs and projects across their global partners. The Field Merchandising Manager must be comfortable in a fast-paced environment working collaboratively across channel marketing, sales, analytics, and external vendors.

Responsibilities

• Prioritize large volume of projects across thousands of retail doors, most with tight deadlines and extreme complexity, with the guidance of the Global Field Merchandising Manager
• Partner closely with Channel Marketing Managers, Strategic Account Managers, 3rd party labor partners, Analytics and Field Sales team members on a regular basis to execute initiatives with the utmost efficiency and accuracy.
• Act as liaison between global 3rd party labor vendors, fixture display companies, channel marketing managers and field sales on any issues that come up in our retail partners globally.
• Assess and make calculated decisions to maximize ROI and efficiency by leveraging partnerships with the internal analytics team.
• Build highly detailed execution plans for a variety of RL initiatives across all product lines.
• Create, maintain, and enforce processes for all operations globally in store and with 3rd party labor vendors.
• Review instructions and execution for multiple projects simultaneously with a keen eye for detail.
• Understand display fixture production process and installation implementation processes to properly prepare workback schedules and deliverables to share cross functionally both internally and externally.
• Critical to understand various retailer 3rd party labor operations to drive best in class execution.
• Manage the reporting of the results of the field execution to internal stakeholders.
• Process all invoices and work closely with the Global Field Merchandising Manager to ensure all 3rd party labor projects are on budget and tracked accordingly.
• Manage 3rd party labor meetings to ensure deliverables are met.

Minimum Qualifications

• Required to be fluent in French
• 3+ years of professional experience on the labor/management of labor for installing and maintaining fixtures in a brick and mortar retail environment.
• Proven ability to understand the unique operating conditions within each retailer and how that impacts the planning and executing of the initiatives for all product lines.
• Must have experience sharing program / project updates across broad teams and organizations - transparency is key within the company culture and the ability to communicate, clear + concise cross functionally.
• Extremely high level of accuracy and attention to detail with ability to track and articulate the intricacies of complex fixture installations.
• Experience managing relationships with cross-functional stakeholders and external vendors.
• Excellent at finding the root cause of issues or gathering the necessary cross-functional members to find that cause or solution to an issue.
• Strong interpersonal skills, approachable and flexible.
• Experience with navigating various organizational environments where culture and structure vary.
• Excellent communicator, superb verbal, and written communication.

Preferred Qualifications

• Also fluent in Spanish
• Familiarity with retail partners and their guidelines / processes
• Experience within a brand executing in-store initiatives through merchandising.
• Experience in planning large-scale executions and installations from concept stage through prototype and production stages.
• Experience in working in a highly cross-functional setting.
• Experience maintaining budgets and fiscal responsibility.