On - Head of Retail Merchandising, Global - Zürich

Team for Career Site

Retail (office team)

In short

The Global Head of Retail Merchandising is a pivotal leader responsible for shaping and driving the global retail assortment vision, retail growth strategy, and commercial performance across all regions. This role ensures that retail product strategy is tightly aligned to brand ambition, consumer needs, and commercial targets—while building robust processes, talent capability, and cross-functional ways of working that scale with the business.

You will define the Retail Buy Planning framework (OTB, guidelines) and guide execution of the assortment strategy, providing coherence and signing off on plans. You will lead the Retail Go-to-Market (GTM) process and optimize in-season performance to maximize revenue and inventory efficiency. As a key strategic voice, you will champion the needs of DTC retail across marketing activation, VM, and operations to deliver a premium customer experience.

Your mission

– Store Segmentation: Develop clustering and tiering strategies to ensure the right product mix, depth and capacity for every store format and market
– Product Advocacy: Champion specific DTC channel needs, while leading the multi-season consumer feedback process to strategically influence future assortment evolution and long-term brand vision.
– Retail GTM Orchestration: Lead the entire Retail Go-to-Market (GTM) process, driving regional alignment across Merchandising, Marketing, VM, Training, and Operations to synchronize execution.
– Process Optimization: Lead the creation of new tools/processes to ensure key milestones (Buying Recaps, Seasonal Kick-offs, Collection Reviews) are effective.
– Allocation and Distribution: Secure optimize Allocation and distribution strategy for business achievements and optimized in store inventory
– Strategic Advocacy & Cross-Functional Influence: Act as the strategic Voice of Retail for merchandising needs, influencing senior stakeholders (Product, Finance, Supply Chain) and regional leadership to ensure retail requirements (store design, VM, training) are prioritized.
– Team Leadership & Capability Building: Mentor, grow, and develop the global retail merchandising function, establishing world-class tools, standards, and talent pipelines.

Your story

– Experience: 10+ years in global Retail Merchandising or Buying, with significant exposure to Go-to-Market (GTM) processes in a vertical retailer.
– Retail Obsessed: Deep understanding of retail operations, store experience, and product’s role in the retail ecosystem. Demonstrated Successful scaling or transforming a global retail store fleet.
– Strategic Leadership & Orchestration: Proven ability to translate brand vision, consumer insights, and market data into a clear merchandise strategy, while possessing the influence to lead without authority and align siloed functions (Marketing, Ops, Product) behind that unified retail vision.
– Commercial Operator: Strong command of financial levers (OTB, margin, stock productivity) and highly analytical decision-making.
– Influential Leader: Exceptional cross-functional collaboration and senior-level influencing skills.
– Builder Mindset: Passion for systems, process creation, team development, and organizational improvement.

Meet the team

The Retail Merchandising team is supporting On, as one of the most exciting and fastest-growing global Premium sportswear brands, with our DTC retail stores operations and expansion. You will lead our Retail Merch team and work closely with key stakeholder teams including Commercial teams, Retail operations and Visual Merchandising.