Senior Merchandise Planner - Sports Retail
BDAWoodinville, Washington, United States · Posted 9 days agoDescription
Most companies claim to have the best people. We say to them, "Keep dreaming." Our people are second to none. They set us apart with their entrepreneurial spirit and ambition. They come to us from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Nordstrom, Starbucks and the sports world, bringing energy, bold ideas and a willingness to dive into the unfamiliar. It's our people that make BDA the top global Merchandise Agency to work for.
Location:
- This role is based in Woodinville, WA and requires you to work onsite 4 days per week, with 1 day remote.
- To be considered, you must live within commuting distance, as regular in-person collaboration is a key part of the role.
Summary
The senior merchandise planner, retail is responsible for driving sales, inventory, and profitability performance through strategic merchandise planning, open-to-buy (OTB) management, inventory optimization, allocation execution, and cross-functional partnership. This role serves as a key business partner to Merchandising, Operations, Distribution, Finance, and Retail Leadership teams, ensuring the right products are available in the right locations at the right time while maintaining inventory productivity and financial objectives.
The position combines analytical planning, inventory management, allocation strategy, vendor support, and operational execution to support both game day and everyday retail performance across multiple channels.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
MERCHANDISE PLANNING & OPEN-TO-BUY MANAGEMENT
- Develop and manage sales, inventory, and receipt budgets at the subcategory and vendor level.
- Maintain Open-to-Buy (OTB) plans and monitor sales, receipts, inventory levels and productivity against business objectives.
- Produce and analyze recurring sales and inventory reports, identifying trends, risks, and opportunities.
- Provide inventory and financial recommendations to support sales, margin, and profitability goals.
- Contribute to annual and in-season financial planning.
MERCHANDISING & VENDOR PARTNERSHIP
- Pwith Merchandisers on assortment planning, purchasing decisions, and vendor negotiations.
- Prepare and distribute vendor and category performance report cards to support buying decisions.
- Establish inventory investment guardrails and validate purchases against approved OTB plans and budgets.
- Collaborate with Merchandising to align inventory strategies with product launches, promotional initiatives, and seasonal business objectives.
ALLOCATION & INVENTORY OPTIMIZATION
- Develop and execute allocation strategies to support game day and store-level inventory needs.
- Build and maintain shipment schedules, coordinating with distribution, arena & retail leadership to optimize inventory flow.
- Communicate allocation decisions and shipment timing to stakeholders while accounting for delivery constraints and blackout periods.
- Partner with operations, retail leadership, and distribution teams to address inventory gaps and ensure inventory transfers and movements are accurately recorded.
- Provide post-game sales reporting and performance summaries to clients and business partners.
- Participate in occasional on-site game day support to validate operational insights and identify opportunities for improvement.
INVENTORY MANAGEMENT & DATA INTEGRITY
- Partner with Finance, Technology, Retail Operations, and other stakeholders to resolve item, inventory, and system data issues.
- Oversee inventory accuracy initiatives, including cycle count administration and reconciliation reporting.
- Support online inventory management processes and cross-channel inventory accuracy.
- Manage item and purchase order creation and sustainment including invoice reconciliation as needed
PRICING, REPORTING & SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATION
- Maintain retail pricing within systems and ensure POS price accuracy.
- Analyze inventory performance to provide recommendations for promotions, markdowns, and inventory risk mitigation.
- Manage internal & external required sales data reporting.
- Identify opportunities to improve reporting, processes, and operational efficiency through enhanced analytics and system utilization.
JOB SKILLS AND TRAITS
- Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel and retail reporting tools.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to manage multiple priorities and deadlines in a fast-paced environment.
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Merchandise Planning, Supply Chain, Retail Management, or a related field preferred; equivalent relevant professional experience will also be considered.
- 3+ years of experience in retail planning, merchandise planning, allocation, inventory management, or a related analytical retail function.
- Strong understanding of:
- Open-to-Buy planning
- Inventory management
- Allocation strategies
- Forecasting and budgeting
- Retail financial metrics
ADDITIONAL NOTES
This role is directly responsible for inventory availability for in season sports team merchandise in retail locations and ecommerce including off season sales
Why BDA?
BDA is a place where creativity, partnership, and customer care come together. For more than 40 years, we have helped some of the world’s most recognized brands create memorable experiences through branded merchandise, gifting, and custom programs. We are proud of the work we do, the relationships we build, and the people behind it all. At BDA, you will find a team that values collaboration, innovation, and a “get it done” mindset — while still making space for creativity, growth, and meaningful impact.
Our Core Values:
- BDA is a Team and a Family
- Always Strive to Be The Best
- Entrepreneurial Spirit
- Tigger Attitude
- Work Hard, Play Hard
- Make It Happen the Best Way
- Total Client Affinity & Advocacy
Want to learn more? So much to explore
- BDA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bda_inc/
- Harper + Scott (a BDA company): https://www.harperandscott.com/ & https://www.instagram.com/harperandscott/
- swagup (a BDA company) end-to-end Merch Ecommerce site: https://www.swagup.com/
- Idea Planet (a BDA company): https://www.ideaplanetlp.com/about
- BDA Careers Page: https://www.bdainc.com/careers/
- LinkedIn – BDA page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bdainc/
#LI-AH1
#LI-Onsite
We are pleased to share the base salary range for this position is $85,000 to $125,000. If you are hired at BDA, your compensation will be determined based on factors that may include geographic location, skills, education, and experience. In addition to these factors, we believe in the importance of pay equity and consider internal equity of our current team members as a part of any offer. In the spirit of pay transparency, the range listed is the full base salary range for the role and hiring at the top of the range would not be typical, in order to allow for future salary growth. The range listed is just one component of BDA’s total compensation and rewards programs, which includes: robust PTO; vacation, a paid volunteer day, holidays and summer Fridays, Benefits; medical, dental, vision, life, and AD&D insurance, 401k; tuition reimbursement, mental health and financial wellness programs and professional development opportunities including tuition reimbursement. Certain revenue-generating positions may be eligible for incentive compensation.
Connect With Us! Not ready to apply? Connect with us for general consideration.
Similar jobs
Est. 261,000 USD
Datadog is entering a new chapter in how our product looks, feels and operates. We're building a small, high-leverage Design Lab team to define that evolution, and we're looking for a Senior Staff Visual Designer to auth…
Est. 146,000 USD
Datadog is looking for an experienced Senior Account Based Marketing Manager to drive new customer acquisition and pipeline generation across the Americas (North America and LATAM), with a focus on our Commercial (SMB) s…
Est. 92,000 USD
Datadog is the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Our SaaS product is used by organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation, cloud migration, and infr…
Est. 60,000 EUR
At Datadog we’re growing our community focused events Datadog Summits, DASH, and our in-office Meetups and User Groups, to enable us to deliver events, and content to our global audience. As we scale these programs we’re…
Est. 194,000 USD
Dataiku is the Platform for AI Success, the enterprise orchestration layer for building, deploying, and governing AI. In a single environment, teams design and operate analytics, machine learning, and AI agents with the…
Est. 261,000 USD
Datadog is entering a new chapter in how our product looks, feels and operates. We’re building a small, high-leverage Design Lab team to define that evolution, and we’re looking for a Staff Visual Designer to help author…
Est. 310,500 USD
Team description At Datadog, AI agents are becoming first-class consumers of observability, security, and software delivery data — from third-party coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot, to our own Bits SRE…
Est. 116,500 USD
We’re looking for an experienced Associate to join our growing GTM Strategy & Operations team. Our team solves complex problems that require insight, creativity, and execution through building scalable processes, too…
Est. 175,500 USD
At Datadog, we're on a mission to build the best platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale, enabling seamless collaboration and problem-s…
Est. 135,500 USD
Our GTM Enablement team plays a critical role in helping Datadog’s Sales and Customer Success teams succeed by equipping them with the right skills, knowledge, and tools at the right time. We partner closely with teams a…
Est. 274,500 USD
We're on a mission to build the best platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale—trillions of data points per day—allowing for seamless col…
Est. 229,500 USD
Datadog is entering a new chapter in how our product looks, feels, and operates. Our Design Lab is defining a new visual direction for the platform, and we’re looking for a Senior Staff Visual Product Designer to help tu…
Est. 216,000 USD
As the Senior Product Manager for Network Path, you’ll own the vision, roadmap, and execution for how our customers visualize, monitor, and troubleshoot network traffic across complex hybrid and cloud environments. You’l…
Est. 139,000 USD
Datadog's brand is entering a new chapter—one that needs a designer with the taste and craft to set the bar for what it looks and feels like. We're looking for a Lead Designer to support that evolution: someone who can t…
Est. 189,000 USD
This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to actively shape how Engineering, one of the most important parts of how Datadog develops its people. You'll sit at the center of Datadog's biggest tale…
Est. 67,500 USD
As an Account Executive (AE) on our Commercial Sales team, you will assist in Datadog’s overall business growth by strategically engaging and closing net-new customers across small to midsize markets. Sellers follow a we…
Est. 216,000 USD
Senior Product Manager - Search Datadog’s Search team helps users – both human and agents – find answers to their questions. Search is a critical function in Datadog, and touches many product surfaces: the query editors…
Est. 310,500 USD
The Dashboards product is Datadog's unified single-pane-of-glass for metrics, logs, and traces—a comprehensive treasure trove of observability data. We are transforming Dashboards into an AI-native control surface and th…
Est. 216,000 USD
Applied AI is where Datadog's ambitious AI bets get built and shipped (Bits Chat, updog). We sit at the intersection of research and product: turning promising capabilities from Datadog AI Research lab and the research c…
Est. 180,000 USD
The Internal Product Analytics (IPA) team is the analytics backbone of Datadog's Product organization. With over thirty products on a single platform, IPA gives PMs and leadership the data, tooling, platform, and analysi…
Est. 216,000 USD
Today, everyone from PMs to Sales to SREs uses AI to query their business data - but every answer is a one-off with no governance, no consistency, and no visibility for data teams. We're building the system that fixes th…
Est. 172,500 USD
The Datadog Major Accounts Team is focused on driving new business and expanding the current Datadog footprint with our largest and most strategic clients. The success of the Major Accounts Team directly impacts the succ…
Est. 216,000 USD
Today, organizations struggle to ensure their most important digital experiences are working as intended because observability data is scattered across products and siloed in logical layers of their technical stack. We'r…
Est. 189,000 USD
This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to actively shape how Engineering, one of the most important parts of how Datadog develops its people. You'll sit at the center of Datadog's biggest tale…
Est. 63,000 USD
As a Customer Success Associate, you will focus on the long term strategic relationship with our customers, drive adoption, and identify growth opportunities across a high volume of Datadog customers to ensure successful…
Est. 228,000 USD
MKTQ327R36 Databricks' Data + AI World Tour is one of the company's largest global demand-generation and brand engines — a 20 stop series of flagship, city-by-city events that bring the Data + AI Summit experience direct…
Est. 184,000 USD
Our Director, Enterprise Sales will provide strategy, mentorship, and guidance for a team of Enterprise Sales Executives who are responsible for driving new business through the full sales cycle. At Datadog, we place val…
Est. 114,500 USD
Datadog is seeking a Field Marketing Manager to support and execute high-impact programs across the North Central region in North America. In this role, you’ll collaborate with regional Sales and Marketing teams to drive…
Est. 92,000 USD
Datadog’s Revenue Operations & Finance team continues to expand as we work continuously to improve and solve complex business problems. The Sales Revenue team supports Datadog’s rapid growth by collaborating with tea…
Est. 116,500 USD
The GTM Operations Associate - Channels & Alliances will join a global team driving Datadog's next phase of growth. We are interdisciplinary thinkers with diverse backgrounds across consulting, finance, strategy, ope…