As Central Merchandising Manager, you’ll play a pivotal role in enabling scalable growth and stronger commercial performance across TU Clothing. Sitting within the Clothing Commercial Operations team, you’ll lead the delivery of the merchandising strategy through centralised planning, robust governance and continuous optimisation of tools, processes, and ways of working.
This role is critical in improving commercial control, visibility and execution across the division, strengthening data‑led decision making and ensuring consistent, efficient, and commercially sound merchandising activity.
What you’ll do
You’ll provide central leadership and governance across merchandising planning, ensuring category plans align to the overarching Clothing strategy while identifying growth drivers, trends and future opportunities. The role will focus on developing and embedding clear commercial frameworks and guardrails - including option planning, markdown planning, OTB and stock management, to enable consistent and high‑quality decision making across categories. You’ll lead the evolution of merchandise planning processes, working closely with Technology to drive the change and development roadmap for key tools, and continuously improve how data and insight are used across the business.
A core part of the role is enhancing data visibility, owning the quality of stock insight, managing terminal stock positions and driving progress against key KPIs to protect profitability and stock health. You’ll work in close partnership with Merchandising, Buying, Supply Chain, Finance, and wider teams to embed new ways of working, support performance reviews, and ensure a single, aligned view of Clothing performance across channels.
Who you are
You’re a commercially strong merchandising leader who thrives on using data, insight and structure to drive better decisions. You’re confident working across complex, multi‑category environments and are comfortable leading through ambiguity. You bring a collaborative mindset, are able to challenge constructively, and are passionate about developing teams, improving ways of working and delivering sustained commercial impact.
To be considered for this role, you must have demonstrable, in‑depth experience within Clothing merchandising, including hands‑on experience with merchandising planning, forecasting and commercial decision‑making at pace and scale.
Essential Criteria
- Deep understanding of merchandising planning, forecasting and core merchandising tools
- Strong and broad commercial merchandising experience, with the ability to drive effective decisions across a diverse category landscape
- Proven ability to analyse complex data and translate it into clear, actionable commercial insight
- Experience delivering new processes and continuous improvement, using lean or agile approaches
- Proven experience leading, coaching and developing high‑performing teams
- Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to engage and challenge effectively across functions and senior stakeholders
#Commercial
