Product Category Manager

Title: Product Category Manager

Location: Peterborough, Hybrid, 3 days a week

The Company:

Our client are a global, e-commerce, luxury fashion brand, headquartered in Peterborough, England. They specialise in Electricity, Lighting and Hardware and deliver to over 100 countries worldwide.

About The Role:

Amplus Talent are on the lookout for an experienced Product Category Manager to work within an extremely creative, e-commerce orientated Product function.

Are you a proven Product expert, with previous experience in delivering Products from concept to market?

Are you able to develop a vision for Product categories, paying close attention to research on market data and trends, to be able to build strategies to execute?

Do you thrive in a dynamic environment and have a natural ability to quickly shift between various different tasks, whilst still maintaining a eye for detail?

Your key duties and responsibilities will include:

• Leading and driving existing and new product developments and ensuring all task owners remain on track with milestones.
• Regular review of PowerBI reports, assessing daily and weekly trends of both current and new items within your category.
• Reporting on and responding to differences in new product performance vs. plan, working cross functionally, to either increase or decrease inventory and/or create mitigation plans.
• Developing adoption and deletion criteria specific to the categories that you’re responsible for.
• Ensuring that sales, margin, and profit expectations are met, whilst keeping a close eye on the market pricing. This includes frequent product range reviews to maximise revenue-generation and profitability.
• Developing and updating plans for categories and analysing performance of lines across all channels, to identify product gaps or exit strategies.
• Creating and delivering Commercial Business Cases for projects, and Product Design Specifications.
• Working with marketing to gain relevant insight to underpin design briefs.
• Developing recommended assortments by customer type and potential sales volume to optimise sales, taking into account geographic and location differences.
• Monitoring a Product Development Plan to ensure that deadlines are adhered to, and any changes from the plan are being communicated and managed accordingly.
• Providing Design and Product Development/Engineering specific information on features and benefits that need to be included in new products, both in the design briefs, as well as on an ongoing basis.
• Working with Design, Product Development/Engineering, Sourcing, Compliance and QC to ensure that new development will exceed performance criteria, and organisational objectives.
• Presenting new product introductions to internal and external stakeholders prior to market launch, including rationale for introduction, product features and benefits, phase-in-phase-out plans, marketing support materials as appropriate.
• Delivering category training, to help you better understand your verticals, both operationally and technically.
• Developing inventory reduction phase out strategy for discontinued product ranges.
• Working closely with the Head of Product Control to monitor product quality and facilitate resolution of problems when they occur.

About You:

• Proven experience as a product manager/category manager in a similar type of environment.
• Previous experience with lighting products, switches, sockets or smart products is beneficial.
• Experience using a PIM (Product Information Management) system would be useful.
• An analytical mindset, with the ability to make qualitative assessments of past performance of products, current issues, and forecasted trends.
• Good working knowledge of category management, marketing and sales principles.
• A natural ability to be able to confidently build and present business cases to to relevant stakeholders.
• Experience using NetSuite, or a similar system.
• Skilled negotiator and influencer to gain cross-functional support for new product initiatives.
• An ability to prioritise workload and manage your time effectively, to enable you to meet strict product deadlines.
• A passion for all things brand and category management.
• Strong project management skills – experience using SmartSheet or similar would be an advantage.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Proficient spreadsheet and computer skills working in Excel, Word, Google Docs etc.

Interested?

If you are interested in working for an ambitious, e-commerce, online retailer, apply directly with a copy of your CV and we’ll be in touch.

About Ampus Talent:

We’re an international recruitment consultancy for ambitious, high-growth businesses. We help the individuals that we represent to succeed in their careers, and the companies that we partner with, to achieve their operational objectives.