Merchandising Analyst 2021

At Thread, we’re helping people to feel happier and more self-confident by making it easy to dress well. We do this using a combination of human stylists and powerful machine learning algorithms to recommend each user the perfect things just for them—in their size, budget, and style—which they can then buy in one place from our huge range of over 100,000 menswear and womenswear items from hundreds of high street, premium and in-house brands. Most people want to look good but some don't particularly enjoy shopping, so we believe if we get this right we can create the new default for how hundreds of millions of people across the world buy their clothes.

We truly believe that modern data science can revolutionise merchandising - fully or partially automating most numerical decisions - leaving merchandisers to make higher level strategic decisions and provide bespoke analytical insight. We’re looking for a Merchandising Analyst who shares our vision and wants to be part of our cutting-edge commercial team here at Thread, this is a great role to kick start your career in Merchandising.

Reporting into the Head of Merchandising, you’ll use detailed customer data to figure out what stock we should invest in across both womenswear and menswear in order to improve customer experience and increase margin. Your work will ensure we know how much stock to buy, and exactly what stock, across all our stocked brands and help us to identify which new items to add to make our stocked range perfect for our users.  This involves developing range plans across both branded product and private label, helping the buying team decide where to focus their efforts, and working closely with brands to get the right stock in. You’ll also work with our data science team in developing powerful algorithms to turn as much of this into a science as possible.

All in all, this presents a unique merchandising challenge. To solve it we intend to blend top-notch fashion merchandising expertise with cutting edge data science, reinventing merchandising for the digital age as a result. We’re looking for a Merchandising Analyst who has the drive and ability to be part of making this happen.

Key Responsibilities

You’ll be responsible for the following for our branded and private label businesses across both womenswear and menswear:

• Setting seasonal budgets for all our stocked brands
• Identifying opportunities to improve our range through your own analysis, and working with data scientists
• Creating range plans and other guidance for our buying team based on detailed analysis of customer data
• Quantifying, sizing & signing off orders
• Creating reports in order to analyse trade performance and communicating findings to both our brands and the wider business
• Working alongside our merchandising team to identify trading lessons learnt, and set product and brand strategies
• Constantly iterating on our tools and processes for managing inventory and margin to ensure our merchandising function is as efficient and effective as possible
• Designing and conducting bespoke analysis to solve problems and assess growth opportunities

Required Experience

You’re highly analytical:

• You have an A grade in Maths at A-level and ideally high grades in other analytical-based A-levels
• An analytical degree would also be a bonus
• You genuinely love working with numbers
• Working with vast amounts of data excites you
• You default to data for decision making
• You have exceptionally high attention to detail
• You love identifying and solving hard problems

You are commercial with a passion for fashion retail:

• You ideally have work experience in retail, either on the shop floor or in head office
• You have commercial awareness and can demonstrate an interest in the fashion retail industry

You’re super organised and thrive working in a fast-paced environment:

• Having too much on your To Do list doesn’t phase you
• You make sure you get the most important things done, hit deadlines and can juggle lots of things at once
• You thrive under pressure

You’re comfortable with and interested in technology:

• You have experience working with Excel formulas and pivot tables
• You can either already write SQL to access data from a database, or would be excited to learn how to
• You are excited by our vision of traditional merchandising being replaced by data science

You must have the right to work in the UK in order to be eligible for this position