Category Manager, Walmart
Company Summary: MGA Entertainment, a consumer entertainment Products Company headquartered in Chatsworth, California, manufactures innovative lines of proprietary products for the toy and consumer electronics market. The company also licenses its IP in such areas as apparel, home décor, stationery, and sporting goods. The MGA family includes award-winning brands such as LOL Surprise, Little Tikes®, Project MC2, and Zapf Creation®. For more information, please visit www.mgae.com.
Mission: The Category Manager is responsible for providing category management and strategic selling support to the MGA Entertainment team on the Walmart business. This includes analysis for assortment, pricing, promotion and shelf layout. This role will identify opportunities to better leverage data resources and empower the organization to use the information through enhance reporting and analytical techniques. Through utilizing POS data, panel data and custom research the Category Manager will create customized selling stories. This individual will integrate online and offline data to provide a true omnichannel view of categories and the market.
The position will focus on the following areas:
- This position will be the key contact with the Walmart Buyer as well as internal MGA departments (sales, marketing, forecasting, brand analysis and customer marketing)
- Lead, develop and maintain category management initiatives for key categories at Walmart
- Integrate online and offline data to provide a true omnichannel view of categories and the market
- Monitor in-store and online retailing activity and conduct competitive merchandising audits
- Build, maintain and or improve reporting dashboards to keep employees informed of key sales trends
- Collaborate with category owners and leaders to uncover challenges in each line of business and create data driven solutions to solve them
- Mentor and train colleagues to use data and tools to continuously improve business performance
Position Requirements:
- Self-motivated, results-oriented leader with a proven track record of best-in-class category management
- Experience working with and analyzing large data from Retailer POS data systems and syndicated data such as NPD, IRI, AC Nielsen and Spectra
- Proactive, creative thinker able to assess retail environment, POS trends and promotional lifts and translate into sales opportunities.
- Able to work with high volume of data, conduct analyses and present it in a concise manner, while maintaining accuracy and attention to detail
- Increased level of decision making to clarify and follow up on information necessary to draw analyses
- Strong organizational and negotiation skills
- Advanced knowledge using Excel, PowerPoint and data warehousing applications like Power BI.
Education/Experience:
- 5+ Years of experience in category management, sales customer marketing, trade marketing, sales planning, space planning and/or sales research in a retail or consumer products industry
- Toy manufacturing experience strongly preferred
- Strong understanding of retail merchandising
- Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, Supply Chain Management or a similar technical field required–Master’s Degree preferred
- Strong Knowledge of MS Office (Excel and PowerPoint), OSPOS and JDA Prospace or similar space planning tool