Associate – Category Management

Strat Date: December 2024/January 2025 

Hybrid Role (4 days in the office & 1 day working from home) 

Who We Are

Wayfair is reinventing the way people shop for their homes and our team is tasked with building a best in class Home retail business across the UK and German markets. As a Category Associate, you would own a set of UK based suppliers and solve complex problems across pricing, merchandising, operations, and promotions to achieve hyper growth.

To be successful in this role you will possess a highly analytical mindset, passion and self-motivation and you will be dedicated to delivering a superb customer experience by making excellent assortment decisions informed by our wealth of browsing and purchasing data. You will be responsible for growing sales while improving profitability, as well as identifying new business opportunities, developing internal and external relationships and negotiating with key suppliers. Other areas of focus could include expanding the assortment and developing a competitive strategy for the market.

In this role, you will work closely with your team to set and execute the strategy for a supplier portfolio, develop supplier relationships, drive process improvements across the Supply Chain and negotiate pricing and inventory.

Being a part of Category Management means you enjoy setting and driving a vision and operating analytically to get results, whilst keeping a hard focus on execution of high impact tasks for your team and yourself. Strong communication is critical for the success of Category Management given the interaction with almost every function and team at Wayfair to ensure alignment is tight and priorities are agreed upon.

We welcome applications from high caliber professionals for whom style & home décor represent a meaningful arena to use the skills they developed in generalist business settings.

What You’ll Do

• Manage a large portfolio of suppliers 
• Develop strategic supplier and category plans to achieve revenue and profitability goals
• Analyze event and category performance and pivots business accordingly
• Conduct competitive and product category evaluation to evaluate market trends
• Drives relationships and collaboration with cross-functional teams to identify and fill assortment opportunities
• Enthusiastically negotiate for favorable terms with suppliers (selection, pricing, promotions)
• Conduct competitive and product category analysis to identify new suppliers to increase and expand selection across product categories

What You’ll Need

• Some demonstrable experience in an analytical/sales based internship role
• A strong interest in building a career in buying and/or supplier relationship management
• A personable and energetic communicator, eager to build relationships with new business partners
• Ability to communicate and feel comfortable speaking directly with C-suite level suppliers from large companies
• Strong organizational skills and the ability to manage and prioritize multiple projects at once; you don’t miss the details
• An interest in, and/or ability to learn, retail math concepts
• Analytical thinker who looks for (and finds) answers in the data
• Ability to “hit the ground running” – a self-starter capable of achieving specific target goals
• An entrepreneurial spirit and mindset
• Familiarity with Microsoft Excel and working with data
• Fluency in Mandarin is considered a plus