Category Merchandise Manager

As we continue our mission to make people happy through chocolate, we’re looking for a Category Merchandise Manager to join our Supply Team on a permanent basis.

As Category Merchandise Manager, you will play a pivotal role in driving the success of our chocolate and café categories across all channels.

You will provide the business with a comprehensive view of opportunities and risks related to stock and sales, ensuring that every decision supports growth. Leading a dedicated team of Merchandisers, you will offer strategic guidance on category-level assumptions and drive performance to optimise chocolate sales, manage stock at a total level and maintaining a focus on managing inventory and availability across all UK channels.

As well as a competitive salary and a range of company benefits, you’ll receive 50% discount on all products, and a 70% discount for you and your guests when you stay at our Rabot Estate hideaway on the paradise island of Saint Lucia.

Here at Hotel Chocolat, we've adopted hybrid working. This means you’ll join us on site for three days a week, and for the other two days – you can work from wherever you like! The on-site location for this role is our support office, ‘Mint House’, in Royston, Hertfordshire. Our home from the very beginning, it’s just off the A505 and 10 minutes’ walk from Royston train station, with direct rail links to London King’s Cross.

What you’ll be doing….

• Lead and develop a team of merchandisers, setting high expectations of delivering a world-class merchandising function. Act as champion for the requirements of the merchandisers in the business to drive forecast accuracy and stock management in all areas- be those systems, resource, insight, support from business stakeholders (e.g. commercial trading) or confirmation of business strategy. This will allow the merchandise team to work with clarity and efficiency.

• Provide a clear view of risk and opportunity in chocolate and café categories in the business across all channels - collating the category-specific expertise of your team into one balanced view, always accessible, to enable the business to plan for/mitigate risk, and unlock opportunities identified. This includes management of the WSSI, sales forecasting, inventory levels and BBE management across your areas of responsibility.

• Work together with channels leads and the seasonal merchandising function to understand factors affecting demand, be those changes to wholesale partners, amends to channel plans, seasonal demand/sell-through plans etc and feed this into the merchandise team as relevant, ensuring any cross-dependencies/indirect impacts between categories are understood and managed.

• Collaborate with the Senior Merchandisers: Process and transformation to secure support to continuously improve and optimise processes, templates, ways of working etc within your team of merchandisers.

• Champion the PFA system integration through the team ensuring we’re set up for success as we transition from Excel to a planning and forecasting system, thinking about our processes and ways of working and what this will look like in the future as we transition.

• Working with the Head of Merchandising, ensure timely, robust and accurate submissions into the S&OE and S&OP processes for categories under your remit- including intake submissions plus BBE identification/mitigation in all channels, and financial reforecasts (working with UK trade and commercial finance) on own channels.

• Constructively challenge your team to identify opportunities at every turn, acting as the escalation point to drive action from other teams/individuals when needed, to always deliver a “best for business” result. This could include areas such as range planning, VM optimisation, MOQ/Case size changes or Supply Planning interactions to name just a few.

• Inspire and motivate your team, through constant collaboration, exceptional communication and always ensuring clarity of assumptions and expectations. Coach and develop your team, setting clear objectives, development opportunities, recognising great performance and supporting development areas as relevant.

Who you are…

Essential

• Experience of managing, developing and leading a team.
• Exceptional people management and engagement skills.
• Advanced/expert Excel skills.
• A strong ability to simplify and summarise large amounts of data.
• Proactive natured and adaptable

Desirable

• Extensive in-role experience of working within a retailer in a merchandising/stock planning function.
• Excellent cross-functional influencing skills.

Who are we?

We’re one of the UK’s favourite premium chocolate brands, with a range of products spanning luxury gifts, alcohol and our pioneering drinking chocolate system, the Velvetiser™.

A cacao pod takes years to grow – it can’t be rushed if it’s going to be just right for our products. The same can be said for Hotel Chocolat, which originally started as a mint production company before we realised it was luxury chocolate that we were really passionate about.

Now, we’re market leaders in the industry. What began as an online-only business grew to over 140 stores across the UK, and we’re still growing… Today, we’re multi-category, multi-channel, and multi-territory, and our customers, colleagues, cacao farmers and suppliers all benefit from the success we make together.

To learn more about us and read about our People Pledge – our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion – click here: hotelchocolat.com/uk/engaged-ethics/our-people.html