Merchandising Assistant

You're the operational support layer for the buying and planning team. Sample tracking is a constant — logging samples as they arrive, flagging missing ones, coordinating returns to vendors after review. Purchase order management runs in parallel: updating quantities, tracking confirmation dates, catching vendor acknowledgments, escalating when something hasn't shipped. The work is detail-intensive, and things that slip tend to show up as problems downstream in shipping or receipts.

Line sheet and assortment preparation — pulling together product information, updating price and availability, maintaining the internal tools buyers use to make decisions — is often significant. You're supporting buyers making seasonal decisions across potentially hundreds of SKUs, and the information they're working from needs to be accurate. Vendor communication is ongoing: following up on open questions, chasing late responses, coordinating sample pickups — the administrative pipeline that keeps sourcing and buying conversations moving.

This role is often a direct entry point into buying or planning, and people who treat it that way — paying attention to how decisions get made, asking questions about the process — tend to advance faster. Pattern recognition and commercial instincts develop over time if you're paying attention. Those who aren't actively building their knowledge of the business while doing the admin often find themselves in the same role longer than they expected.