Global Category Project Manager

GrandVision is a global market leader in optical retailing. The company is transitioning toward more centralization, to ensure a globally designed assortment strategy and an effective marketing strategy across its 34 retail banners. The BU Sun is looking for a Global Category Project Manager, to support the centralization by designing and leading different strategic and operational projects within the BU.

About GrandVision

GrandVision is the company behind retail banners such as Pearle, EyeWish, and Brilleland. The company has over 36.000 employees and has sold over 16 million prescription glasses. GrandVision has a presence in more than 40 countries and over 7000 stores. With that, the product portfolio of GrandVision’s optical retail products is large and complex. To further professionalize and streamline its assortment strategy, GrandVision is transitioning toward more centralization. The aim is to design marketing and assortment strategies (both for in store and online) largely at a global level – without losing sight of the individual characteristics of the markets and GrandVision’s different retail banners in different countries.

GrandVision’s headquarters are located in Amsterdam, where the team is highly international and the culture is open. Innovation is a core value at GrandVision, and the atmosphere is ambitious. Everyone at GrandVision is passionate about the companies’ products, and strives for solid and ever-improving customer satisfaction. To achieve this, working together with the many different banners and countries, whether these brands and markets are young or mature, is a core priority for the head office.

About the Vacancy

The role of Global Category Project Manager was newly created to help enable GrandVision’s new centralization ambitions, specifically for the BU Sun. GrandVision and the BU Sun have identified a lot of potential in terms of economies of scale, implementing best practices across the brands and countries, and using advanced data and analytics to improve the performance of all of the products within the BU. The strategy for this has been created from scratch. However, the BU Sun – whose central Category Management team has only recently been built – currently lacks the capacity and capabilities to fully realize this potential. The Global Category Project Manager will be brought on to initiate, and provide both leadership and support on, a range of projects that should allow the BU Sun to capitalize on synergies and opportunities that are brought about by the centralization.

The role is brand new, but the Category Management team has already started projects that the Global Category Project Manager can take on from day 1. For instance, a single product launch across a large number of banners is currently being set up, as a pilot to analyze and improve performance across different banners, and better understand how these banners can be supported in their marketing and category management strategies. Other aspects of the job may include the creation and implementation of tools for advanced product performance analyses; training country teams or headquarter teams in the usage of such tools; or setting up more streamlined communication routes between relevant product managers, banner leadership, and HQ. There will be a lot of room for the Global Category Project Manager to create and prioritize new projects based on his or her own insight, expertise, and analysis. That is partly because this is a new role within a new team and a new centralization strategy, and partly because GrandVision is an innovative company where creativity and initiative are respected and rewarded.

The Global Category Project Manager reports to the Head of Category Management but has his or her main stakeholders everywhere in the organization. This role is highly versatile and influential, and a retail or category management professional with excellent communication skills and stakeholder management skills will be able to have tremendous impact within GrandVision and the BU Sun. The ideal candidate for this role has experience with product management (e.g. launches and lifecycle); retail strategy; product performance analysis; and transformation management, in an international and fast-paced environment. A successful candidate will see plenty of opportunities to grow his or her career at GrandVision, where internal promotion (within HQ or internationally, either in the line or cross-functionally) is sought after and encouraged.

Experience and skills

• >5 years’ experience in strategy consulting / retail strategy in combination with experience in category management, product management and merchandising
• Knowledge of product performance tools and indicators, and the creativity and analytical skills to further develop toolsets and product performance assessment methodologies for category management teams
• Experience in an international working environment, whether this is a large corporate, or an innovative scale-up
• Excellent and demonstrable stakeholder management skills and the ability to convince others
• Experience with successfully managing projects end-to-end, on both a strategic and an operational / implementation level
• Ability to create and run different projects at the same time, cross-functionally and at different levels within an organization
• Experience with working in a matrix structure, and the ability to influence and convince colleagues outside his or her direct line of management

GrandVision works with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.
Contact Martine Francken at martine@topofminds.com for more information.