Head Of Retail - Fashion
What is the role?
As Head of Retail - Fashion, you will build and lead high-performing teams to deliver an extraordinary level of customer experience that is synonymous with luxury and the Selfridges brand. You will be instrumental in leading multiple divisions and teams within the store, closely supporting the Store Director in delivering a consistent and homogenous experience for both customers and team members. You will create a seamless experience and offer between our Own Bought and Concessions businesses within your scope, strategically collaborating with key stakeholders across the entire business in connecting strategy and insight to build concrete plans. You will role model our Values and inspire our management team to create and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers and team members alike.
As Head of Retail, you will:
➢ Work on the overall vision and purpose of this newly created role within Oxford Street, leveraging untapped opportunities within the store to achieve synergies and efficiencies across divisions.
➢ Create and build synergised selling teams across divisions who can positively impact overall customer experience through aligned ways of working and service standards.
➢ Coach divisional managers to be a strong bridge between retail and other key functions, ultimately ensuring that retail is consistently being consulted on key initiatives and actions well ahead of launch.
➢ Build a high-performing management team within the store, strengthening each level to efficiently focus on key business and customer priorities. Build a strong talent pipeline through Brand Specialist and Department Manager populations that enables a solid succession plan for key roles in Store.
➢ Drive consistency in service standards across divisions, ensuring that the teams leverage Selfridges Unlocked benefits to achieve opt-in and data capture targets set for the store.
➢ Promote the 121 strategy and embed a clienteling driven mindset through the teams, fully maximising opportunities through Brand Specialists, Client Consultants and Private Client Consultants. Motivate Clienteling team to improve engagement rate and the mix of successful appointments, while getting to know & nurture our Top customers.
➢ Deliver sales and profit plans through consistent focus on maximising commercial opportunities while efficiently managing payroll and general costs and reducing stock loss. Provide timely insight to Store Director on any significant trading risks and opportunities, while driving key stakeholders to support with actions that will mitigate losses.
➢ Focus on strategic productivity and performance initiatives to drive sales density across your divisions, being able to flag risks and opportunities proactively and working autonomously with the Buying & Merchandising team on related actions. Ensure you are fully aware of and influence space moves, with divisional managers focusing on the implementation.
Key Skills & Experience:
➢ A natural leader – you are comfortable coaching and influencing peers and teams who do not directly report into you yet need to collaborate with you to achieve collective success. You can drive performance and enable change as well as support development. You are able to make tough decisions with confidence and coherence.
➢ A strong communicator – you are empathetic yet confident in your manner, and you excel in building solid relationships with your stakeholders as well as our internal management teams.
➢ Commercially astute – You are responsive and timely in leveraging key commercial opportunities throughout the store, getting the relevant stakeholders on board to support with actions. You will ultimately build strong relationships across all functions that will enable you to have influence over how we plan and deliver the store commercial plans.
➢ Innovative – You anticipate developments and seize commercial and strategic opportunities seeing them through to achieve successful outcomes and truly create the extraordinary for both internal and external customers.
➢ Agile & Solution-oriented – you can deal with ambiguity and are able to navigate in the grey, with a high level of tact and empathy, remain constructive and solution-oriented keeping in mind the overall objective of the role and importance of collective success.
➢ Versatile – you are comfortable with cross-functional decision-making using a wide range of information in a well thought out way to recognise potential risks and align to overall goals
➢ A team player – you bring ideas and share best practices with other senior leaders across the business. You are collaborative and can work flexibly as part of the management team and support with projects and in cross functional meetings as appropriate.
➢ A champion of creative leadership – You encourage and connect thinking above and beyond the obvious whilst empowering teams to experiment and think differently when tackling new challenges or opportunities.
➢ Market Expert & Networker – you are well informed of market trends, competitor performance and able to gauge opportunities for Selfridges to improve its overall positioning. You will proactively leverage your connections within the market and brands to stay ahead of trends and ultimately strengthen our relationships with our partners, while influencing their offer around team, product and service. Key Measures of Success for this role:
➢ Growth across key customer metrics, including Selfridges Unlocked and Opt-in, VIPs, Clientelling engagement and sales mix
➢ Positive people metrics, including EOS engagement rate and team productivity and performance
➢ Achievement of sales & profit plans through strategic management of key levers to impact top & bottom line. Improved contribution from key investments through maximisation of full price sell-through and reduction of stock loss.
This guide represents a summary of the role, however all team members are expected to be flexible in the work they undertake and department location, which may change from time to time, according to the needs of the business
Selfridges has always been much more than a shop. We’re a social space where everyone is welcome and feels a sense of belonging, a creative playground where culture and commerce collide, and an experimental hub where you can discover the most innovative and sustainable ideas in retail. We’re here to help make the world brighter. And you can be an important part of this. We’ll talk more about the role below, but before we get to that, let’s share with you the good stuff…
Rewards and benefits
Life at Selfridges is dynamic, exciting, and always evolving. As well as working with some of the most cutting-edge, iconic and boundary-pushing brands, designers and creatives, we also offer our team members opportunities to help make a positive difference through our network of communities, both within and outside Selfridges. Here are just a few of our rewards and benefits that help make our team experience that bit more extraordinary.
Flexible working options to benefit you, your family and your wellbeing that can include part-time, flexi-time, job sharing or hybrid working
Generous annual leave that increases with length of service
Up to five paid volunteering days – from beach cleans to co-ordinating food and clothing donations
Family leave that suits your set up including Maternity, Paternity, Adoption, Surrogacy and Shared Parental leave policies
Defined pension contribution scheme
Generous bonus and/or commission scheme
Enviable team member discount including sale previews and double discount days
Exclusive local discounts on a range of restaurants, bars, beauticians and entertainment
Subsidised gym memberships
Annual travel pass and cycle-to-work schemes
A sustainable car salary sacrifice scheme
Several internal communities to get involved in from our Diversity Board and Green Warriors who are leading the charge on D,E&I and sustainability, to the Wellbeings who are always thinking of new ways to champion healthy minds, bodies and routines for our team members
Workplace Options, our confidential team member assistance programme for when life gets tricky or you need a little guidance
Access to a wide range of training programmes to help your career development