Department: Sourcing & Ethical
Location: Head Office, Chelsea House
Description
The Responsible Materials Partner will be a central point of contact within River Island for material expertise. Playing a key role in providing new sourcing, development and trend direction across fabric & yarn to our Design and Buying teams across home production and brought in suppliers. This role will provide value through optimising material sourcing, scaling up consolidation and negotiation on core fabrics and seasonal volumes. This is achieved by working closely with Buying, Design, Fabric Tech, Sustainability and the Home Production teams. The role is instrumental in ensuring that we offer on-trend, new fabrics that support in achieving our sustainable material targets as well as quality & best priced offer.
What You'll Do
- Drive the delivery of River Island key fabric trends to the BMD teams alongside the design trend presentations seasonally outlining newness on materials, yarn, print, washes and finishes.
- Deliver regular fabric trend reports through social media, catwalk, fabric trade show, comp-shops as well as weekly fabric newness meetings.
- Lead speed to market fabric sourcing strategy to deliver fast track production focus via HP. Join weekly trade meetings to sign off fabric trading opportunities at speed.
- Work with the buying teams to structure sustainable fabric strategies to deliver sustainability commitments with biggest impact, robust certification and minimal margin impact.
- Identify core volume fabric pots, seasonal volumes and speed to market fabric trends. Suggest new pot moves on to ensure core lines offer the newest fabric updates.
- Build fabric price architecture with buying teams to deliver margin and quality.
- Support bulk fabric negotiation & cross costing core fabrics & HP orders to contribute to the delivery of departments margin targets.
- Maintain an affective in-house Fabric Library & action sampling for development samples.
About You
- Significant experience of woven and jersey fabric purchasing & production, as well as fabric printing process’.
- Strong understanding of new sustainability legislation and sustainable fibre switching implementation.
- Experience in building fabric strategy working across multiple departments, regions and critical paths.
- In depth knowledge of fashion trends, interpreting market intel, and comp shops.
- Knowledge of product critical paths and open/cross costings.
- Confidence in reading fabric technical reports & specs.
- Global material supply chain knowledge and contacts essential with robust relationships.
- Collaborative, highly organised, able to prioritise.
- Agility and ability to absorb change in line with business priorities.
- Strong negotiation skills.
- Confident presentation skills and excellent communication skills.
About Us
We’re a much-loved brand with an exciting future. Our Islanders are a diverse bunch of bright, talented people who love working together – and are proud of the work they do. Progression here can take you in all kinds of directions. This is what a career at River Island is like. And this is where yours starts.
This role is based at our Head Office in West London. Check us out here on a map.
What we can offer you:
💰 Generous 50% staff discount so you can treat yourself to the latest products, and a bargain staff shop on site!
🛒 Reducing Islanders everyday expenses through discounts, benefits, financial advice, wellbeing solutions and more through Reward Gateway!
🎉 A free onsite gym, subsidised restaurant & café to fill you needs. Various social events to socialise throughout the year.
🤎 Every family is unique, we support Islanders with all different family setups enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption & fertility treatment. We also work closely with the Retail Trust to create dedicated support for all our Islanders!
💻 Flexible working is a given, on top of payday and summer early finish Fridays.
💕 Give as you earn scheme, a ‘Giver Island’ day each year and receive matched funding.
🎓 Support with upskilling through on the job training and qualifications. A succession plan if you want to progress.
💰 A generous bonus scheme & private pension plan.
🩺 The choice to opt in for healthcare through our provider AXA.
☀️ 25 days paid holiday, exclusive of Bank Holidays. With the added option to purchase additional holiday twice a year for whatever the need!
Keeping You Safe
At River Island we are committed to the safeguarding of all of our employees regardless of age or job role. We will fulfil our obligation under the Prevent duty which seeks to stop extremism and extremist views from materialising in our business. We promote and encourage the belief in British Values- including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. To find out more, please visit www.gov.uk.
Our Island is made up of a diverse community, where we all belong and feel part of something bigger. We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles unless operational requirements prevent otherwise. To find out more about this interview process, check out our hiring process below.
