Ralph Lauren Corporation (NYSE:RL) is a global leader in the design, marketing and distribution of premium lifestyle products in five categories: apparel, accessories, home, fragrances, and hospitality. For more than 50 years, Ralph Lauren's reputation and distinctive image have been consistently developed across an expanding number of products, brands and international markets. The Company's brand names, which include Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Collection, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, Polo Ralph Lauren, Double RL, Lauren Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren Children, Chaps, among others, constitute one of the world's most widely recognized families of consumer brands.
At Ralph Lauren, we unite and inspire the communities within our company as well as those in which we serve by amplifying voices and perspectives to create a culture of belonging, ensuring inclusion, and fairness for all. We foster a culture of inclusion through: Talent, Education & Communication, Employee Groups and Celebration.
This is a key role in EMEA Digital Commerce team, leading the EMEA DTC Digital Business Development team working with business stakeholders to support pre-season and in season operations and trading of Ralph Lauren’s European marketplace and digital concession relationships and support wider RL Digital Business development identification / research. This is an emerging growth area with opportunity to work with new business as well as continuing business relationships.
The role partners with, market place vendor business teams, RL EMEA Merchandising, RL Wholesale, RL wholesale marketing, BI analytics, RL finance, warehouse teams and other groups to achieve team growth goals, support great customer experience, and successful, on time project go live.
This role requires excellent trading and commercial instinct, confidence and clarity of communication, a strong and clearly disciplined approach to task, time and project management, clear stakeholder engagement and organisation, and excellent cross-functional communication and partnership. In addition, some eCommerce platform, order flow architecture understanding is important to ensure new integrations address business requirements.
A great opportunity for demonstrating organizational, commercial and entrepreneurial skills in a business area that is unusual in having end to end responsibilities and a very clear line to outcomes.
This role will report into the Head of Digital Commerce for EMEA&LATAM and will manage a team of 2.
Responsibilities
- Identification, modelling, scoping and championing business cases for profitable, sustainable growth opportunities.
- Work with business partners to develop models, and operational plans to support business cases.
- Collaborate with RL Legal services and procurement to negotiate new contracts to maximise benefits for Ralph Lauren and minimize risks.
- Be a champion for business development within the DTC organization, celebrating teams successes and identifying opportunities for improvements in sales, profitability and process.
- Oversees operational activities of the Senior Associate and Assistant within the team across all their activites
- Accountable for successful and timely set up pre-season, and in-season for RL product assortment master data publication to marketplace partners, including attributes and pricing.
- Ensure coloration with RL merchandising partners develops an assortment strategy that supports brand development goals and financial targets.
- Works with RL Marketing to support and develop partner platform marketing strategies that support brand and financial targets.
- Oversee Fulfilment KPI’s and liaise with RL Warehouse partners to ensure partner operational KPI’s are being met and ensure issues are resolved and improvements are identified, roadmapped and pursued through to completion as required.
- Motivates, manages, trains and develops the Business Development team
- Participates in developing the business model vision and direction for marketplace experiences and assortments that drive consumer engagement, reinforcing the brand.
- Identifies, defines, and designs solutions for ongoing optimization of the Ralph Lauren European marketplace relationships and opportunities across the DTC digital portfolio.
- Monitors customer satisfaction and other KPIs, leading to actions where needed.
- Executes projects that drive business and consumer benefit for RL EMEA’s marketplace relationships; responds to the needs of stakeholders and cross divisional partners throughout the development processes.
- Understands changing consumer trends in the digital retail space. Generates new eCommerce experience ideas, researching and analyzing for feasibility and business impact.
- Collaborates with business stakeholders to determine unmet customer needs and develops feature/functionality requirements that meet those needs
- Analyzes competitors and market trends; evaluates technologies; develops detailed requirements, feature definitions, business process changes, and internal communication plans.
- Supports cross-functional teams during the entire lifecycle of product development, including deployment and post-deployment activities. Proactively identifies problems that arise in the project, outlines options, recommends solutions, and escalates as needed
- Works with internal business groups to adjust business tools and practices in order to support new features and functionality and optimize operational efficiency and minimize ad hoc / manual processes.
Experience, Skills & Knowledge
- Relevance in the field and successes demonstrated.
- 4 Strategic cycles as a digital manager in a commercial function, ideally with fashion marketplace platform trading experience, or digital tech project manager or similar function for consumer facing eCommerce businesses.
- Able to demonstrate previous successes in establishing new marketplace trading relationships from conception to successful stable ongoing trading.
- Demonstrable commercial skills in a digital environment where judgement and influence is required to alter assortments / and promotional policy.
- Demonstrated bias for action with strengths in problem solving, issue-resolution, ability to work in a deadline driven work environment, attention to detail, and ability to multitask.
- Demonstrated ability to understand and discuss technical concepts at the functional level
- High level of intellectual curiosity and strong analytical, prioritization and negotiating skills
- Passionate about building great products and solving customer and business problems
- Understanding of full end to end digital consumer journeys and supporting systems and processes.
- Knowledge of one or more from Marketplace platforms, Connectors, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Order Management Systems.
- Experience of managing projects via Jira, Confluence, Monday.com desirable but not essential.
- Experience of managing operations and trading with Farfetch and Data Integrators eg Tradebyte of particular interest.
