People love Dunelm. That statement is true for the millions of Customers, the ‘savvy home lovers’ who love the broad range of quality, value for money homewares products, the unique in-store and online experience, and Dunelm’s distinctive local feel. It is also true for the 12,000 Colleagues who benefit from an ambitious, entrepreneurial, family-oriented culture and challenger-brand mentality which combine to create an environment that is conducive to making things happen fast. And it’s also true for Investors who have seen strong and consistent returns to date and are excited by the leadership team’s calibre and vision, and the strength of Dunelm’s multi-channel offering.
Role Overview
The Analytics Director is a pivotal enterprise leadership role at Dunelm, responsible for shaping how analytics accelerates strategic decision-making, operational performance and long-term growth and transformation.
The role is responsible for:
- Building and leading a world-class analytics capability
- Ensuring that capability directly powers decision-making, optimisation, and commercial performance at scale
- Raising the bar on analytical thinking, standards, and rigour across the entire organisation
This is a significant enterprise leadership role, extending well beyond functional remit.
As a member of the Dunelm Leadership Team (DLT), the role shapes the quality of analytical thinking, evidence-based decision-making and value creation across the business. This includes:
- The quality of analytics across the enterprise
- The standards of thinking and evidence used in decision-making
- The impact of analytics on business performance
1. Build and Lead a World-Class Analytics Function
- Lead all analysts and data scientists across Dunelm
- Develop capability across:
- Advanced analytics
- Data science
- Experimentation
- Develop future leaders and a strong capability pipeline
2. Lead the Optimisation Centre of Excellence
- Embed structured, hypothesis-led problem-solving
- Deliver attributable value through improved business decision-making
3. Own Customer Intelligence Capability
- Deliver a coherent, enterprise view of the customer
- Ensure insight informs both:
- Strategic decisions
- Operational execution
- Lead both qualitative and quantitative customer research
4. Lead Enterprise Experimentation
- Own the transformation-wide testing programme
- Ensure experimentation is rigorous, prioritised and scalable
- Make testing a core operating discipline at Dunelm
5. Set and Enforce Enterprise Standards
- Define what “excellent analytics” looks like at Dunelm
- Establish standards for:
- Methods
- Outputs
- Quality
- Documentation
- Actively remove duplication and low-value work
6. Raise the Bar on Analytical Thinking Across Dunelm
This is a defining expectation of the role.
- Improve how leaders:
- Frame problems
- Use evidence
- Make decisions
- Shift the organisation from:
- Descriptive to causal to predictive thinking
- Increase the rigour, clarity and challenge in decision-making
1. Enterprise mindset over functional optimisation
Brings a deeply enterprise-oriented mindset, consistently prioritising end-to-end business value over functional optimisation and ensuring analytics serves the broader interests of Dunelm as a whole.
2. Sets the standard for thinking
Sets an unequivocally high standard for analytical judgement, intellectual rigour and quality of execution, and is uncompromising in challenging weak logic or insufficient evidence.
3. Leads through influence at senior levels
Operates with credibility and confidence at senior level, constructively challenging established thinking, strengthening the logic underpinning key decisions, and ensuring value is both clearly defined and realised in practice.
4. Absolute clarity and simplicity
Distils complexity into:
- Clear insights
- Clear decisions
- Clear actions
5. Relentless focus on value
Prioritises work that drives:
- Decisions
- Outcomes
- Commercial impact
6. Builds and expects excellence
- Sets a high bar
- Maintains it consistently
- Develops others to reach it
7. Comfortable with challenge and tension
Creates constructive friction:
- Between data and instinct
- Between pace and rigour
- Between ambition and feasibility
