Director of Retail
Reports To: Founders/ CFO
Department: Retail
Location: NYC with travel within US
Direct Reports: Store Managers – LA/NYC/Miami plus other cities as we expand.
Salary Range: The applicable salary range for this position, with final offer amount dependent on education, skills, and experience is $120k - $150k annually. This range represents a good faith and reasonable estimate of the range of possible compensation at the time of posting
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop and execute the retail strategy, driving sales and profit. Ensure that contribution and productivity targets are met.
- Source, evaluate, and secure new locations, leading all negotiations with landlords, developers, and agents on heads of terms, lease structures, incentives, and key commercial clauses to achieve target returns on capital.
- Own the end‑to‑end store opening process for each site (permanent and pop‑up), from LOI to handover: legal, design, planning, construction, IT, VM/branding, operations, and post‑opening review.
- Define, document, and continuously improve standard store development processes, governance, and KPIs (budget, timeline, NPS, sales ramp‑up), ensuring repeatable, scalable execution across markets.
- Maximise and promote opportunities, growth and profitability through monitoring and analysing retail performance, trends and forecasts, managing controllable costs and operational standards
- Accountable for the profit and loss of retail and to consistently manage and deliver on commercial growth targets (sales, profit and margin) closely monitoring and controlling the budget with expert budgeting/forecasting on all elements
- Establish strong relationships with key stakeholders internally/externally, including the executive team and cross-functionally to ensure the effective and smooth running of retail
- Directly accountable for the retail team and store performance through commercial excellence and inspirational leadership
- Oversee instore product range launches along with delivery of new merchandising and POS units
- Monitor trade and competitor product ranges and develop solutions to address market trends
- Drive succession plans for the retail teams, strategising how we attract, develop and progress exceptional talent throughout the business.
- Drive and embed a L&D strategy that supports the overall short and long-term retail strategy, driving development pathways for talent throughout the business
- Develop a strong engagement culture in retail, promoting and being an advocate for ‘Best Companies’, driving highly engaged teams and ensuring feedback loops are in place for teams to voice suggestions and opinions responding to ‘Post box’ queries in a timely manner.
- Maintain awareness of fashion trends across all retail industry, be ahead of forthcoming consumer initiatives and launches
Requirements
Person Specification
- An experienced Director of Retail, with extensive retail experience within the US.
- Experience trading a US fast pace retail store, trading stock.
- Strong leadership skills with a high level of drive and passion to succeed and develop the brand
- Creative and inspirational individual, with the ability to develop innovative and commercially successful retail opportunities.
- In-depth knowledge of how to drive and build a retail brand with an understanding of all aspects of store operations, retail standards, visual merchandising, and marketing execution etc.
- In-depth general business awareness and a natural instinct for profit/trading opportunities.
- A proven ability to set goals and establish performance standards, in addition to managing short, medium and long-term objectives.
- Effectively interface with different functions at different levels, and will relish the opportunity to motivate senior managers and store teams to deliver over and above expectations
- Energetic, results driven with a desire to create growth and a passion for delivery, sales, sell through, margin and customer pleasure.
- Excellent interpersonal and influencing skills