Sr. Manager Buying & Planning (Sr. Buyer)

Purpose & Overall Relevance for the Organization:

The Sr. Manager, Retail Buying & Planning plays a pivotal leadership role in executing product strategy across Canadian retail concepts, ensuring strong alignment with market trends and business objectives. This role leads to the development, forecasting, and delivery of seasonal merchandising strategies and assortments that drive category-level sales, margin, and sell-through performance. Through disciplined category planning, inventory management, and active trading, the Senior Manager ensures the product offering reinforces brand positioning, meets consumer demand, and achieves financial targets.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Merchandising Leadership

• Lead the development and execution of seasonal merchandise strategies across all channels, ensuring assortments are consumer-centric, commercially relevant, and aligned with sales, margin, and profitability targets.
• Define and drive top-line seasonal goals, optimizing product sell-through, margin performance, and inventory turns.
• Build strong, collaborative partnerships with Store Allocations, Finance, Marketing, Category Management and Visual Merchandising to ensure alignment on product strategies, inventory flow, and go-to-market (GTM) execution.
• Serve as the primary point of contact between the Buying & Planning team and internal stakeholders, enabling holistic decision-making that balances consumer demand, brand vision, and financial objectives.

Product & Assortment Planning

• Lead the merchandise planning and open-to-buy (OTB) process at category, class, division, product type, and model levels.
• Oversee the development of assortment buy plans that deliver topline sales, margin goals, and targeted inventory turns.
• Identify and capitalize on sales and promotional opportunities across categories, concepts, collections, and articles to maximize revenue and inventory productivity.
• Conduct in-season and post-season analysis to inform future strategies, identify performance drivers, and address assortment gaps or opportunities.
• Present seasonal assortment plans and merchandising strategies to senior leadership, ensuring financial alignment and integration with marketing initiatives.
• Oversee receipt flow, markdown strategy, and inventory management in alignment with OTB plans, margin objectives, and visual merchandising standards.
• Provide strategic guidance on store capacity, sales mix, and merchandising considerations for new store openings, renovations, and expansions.

Market & Trend Analysis

• Monitor market dynamics, competitor activity, and consumer trends to inform product development, buying decisions, and long-term assortment strategies.
• Champion the use of merchandise planning tools to deliver accurate reporting and actionable insights, improving efficiency, productivity, and profitability.
• Proactively communicate category performance, risks, and opportunities to influence future buying strategies and enhance product relevance.
• Travel regularly to store locations and industry markets to assess assortments, engage store teams, and gather competitive intelligence.

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop the Buying and Merchandise Planning team through clear goal setting, performance management, and ongoing coaching.
• Define career paths and support professional growth to build a strong pipeline of future merchandising leaders.
• Foster a high-performing, collaborative team culture focused on accountability, innovation, and measurable commercial impact.

Key Relationships:

• Store Allocation & Inventory
• Category Business Unit (BU)
• Retail Marketing
• Finance & Supply Chain
• Demand Planning
• eCom & Wholesale
• Store Operations & DC
• Retail Fleet
• Store Development

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Advanced proficiency in software applications such as MS Office, Power BI
• Excellent verbal presentation and written communication skills with strong command of English language 
• Knowledge expert of consumer trends, buying habits, retail environment and competition for assigned product categories
• Excellent analytical skills, thorough understanding of retail math and ability to understand and translate financial data to make recommendations and decisions
• Ability to accept and meet critical deadlines with good planning and organization skills
• Thorough understanding of managing and influencing Open to Buy metrics
• Ability to travel up to 25% of the time (nationally