Job Description

Assistant Buyer/Junior Buyer - Chelsea Peers, Multi Category Clothing

An exciting opportunity to join us as an established assistant Buyer/Junior Buyer has been created to address our growing company needs. This job would suit someone from a multi category clothing background who is used to owning their own category areas and who has experience of managing at least one other. This Role will Span our clothing areas covering either Womenswear or Menswear with 1 direct report.

This position will report to the Senior Buyer.

• Working as part of a team to ensure the Buying function runs smoothly.

• Detailed management of department critical path - liaising with suppliers to ensure CP is up to date, escalating issues and risks to deliveries to the Buying and Operations team. Ensuring internal teams are looped in on critical dates.

• Price negotiating and order closures with global factories (with support from the Senior Buyer to ensure all ranges are closed and POs sent in line with the critical path).

• Build and maintain great relationships with the supplier base.

• Responsible for the approval process, viewing approvals through commercial eyes, understanding the vision for the final product and escalating concerns. Ensuring a strong working relationship with the design and print teams.

• Fit sessions participation.

• Awareness of when approval and fit decisions will affect the critical path and communicating this to the team.

• Conducting regular competitive shops and sharing competitor activity with the team. Putting plans in place to correct concerns and identify new product opportunities.

• Price Benchmarking seasonally.

• Assisting in team meetings such as range building, sign offs and strategies.

• Reviewing and preparing weekly sales information to draw conclusions and suggestive actions ahead of trade meetings. Ensuring learnings are factored into future ranges.

• Understanding product components, technical requirements, sourcing and supply chain issues and commercial margin parameters.

• Day-to-Day management of Buying Administrator within the team, developing both their technical and leadership skills

• Understanding and supporting the departmental sourcing strategy.

• Assist in managing wholesale queries and helping the Senior Buyer with buying appointments.

• Raising Delivery delays to Senior Buyer/Ops team and managing outcome, cross referencing with wholesale customer orders.

• Sign off all reference samples and gold seal samples in a timely manner, ensuring all test reports and paperwork have been received. Raising issues to Senior Buyer.

• Assist Senior Buyer with capacity planning each season and collating key dates for production to build company's critical path.

Skills and Experience Required:

• Strong attention to detail

• Flexible with the ability to work at pace in a fast-moving environment.

• Ability to question the norm and make improvements as and when necessary

• Good communication and strong organisational skills

• Excellent problem-solving skills

• Self-Motivated

• Proficient in Microsoft Office, especially Excel

• Full understanding of how to work through the different stages of product development and the buying lifecycle