Senior Inventory Planner

Role Overview

We're looking for a Senior Inventory Planner to own product launch planning and post-launch replenishment execution for Quince's UK and EU expansion. This is not a steady-state replen role. It's the planner who decides how deep we go on new products at launch, then operates the day-to-day to make sure those products actually land on time and scale well.

You'll size initial launch buys for products dropping into the UK and EU at a weekly cadence, often with little or no local demand history, by triangulating from Quince overall performance, comparable products, comparable markets, lead-time realities, and informed judgement. Once products are live, you'll act on early sell-through signals and trigger replenishment decisions fast, pulling forward, doubling down on winners, cutting losses on losers, and adjusting the next launch wave based on what the market is teaching us.

This role sits at the heart of Quince's International expansion. Working alongside a planning and automation counterpart who owns the underlying forecasting models and demand sensing, you'll be the operator who turns those signals into real-world action. Sizing the buys, placing the POs, working the relationships, and getting product in the warehouse on time. Your edge is judgement, speed, and the trust you build with the people who make execution actually happen. You'll be operating where the tooling is still being built around you, the data is thinner than you'd like, and the answer often has to be reasoned from first principles. Comfort operating in a dynamic environment isn't a nice-to-have, it's the job.

The ideal candidate has lived this work before. Sizing launch buys, executing replenishment decisions, working POs through to landing at a DTC or M2C that moves quickly and has international exposure. You're a builder of relationships first and a builder of spreadsheets second. You're energized by placing well-reasoned bets under uncertainty, by getting product to land on time when it shouldn't have, and by the trust you accumulate with vendors and cross-functional partners over time. You communicate constraints bluntly but constructively. You don't wait for perfect data, and you don't let a winning product sit understocked while you wait for statistical significance.

Success in This Role Means

• Product launch buys are sized well. Products that are market winners aren't crippled by stockouts  and losers don't tie up working capital you can't recover.
• Post-launch product replenishment decisions are fast and well judged. Safety stock and WOS is controlled and refreshed as market signals mature. Winning products scale into demand, losing products get cut before they bleed.
• Forecast accuracy improves measurably on new products, even where historical data is thin.
• POs land on time, in full, and any deviation is known, flagged, and managed proactively
• Merch, sourcing, production partners, vendors, and your peer planners in other geographies trust you completely. You're the person they pick up the phone for, the one whose word on a PO they take to the bank, the one they share early intelligence with.
• Inventory turns improve as the UK and EU business scales
• The launch and replen frameworks you build for the UK don't just serve the UK today. They become the blueprint for how Quince plans every new market launch that comes next.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end launch planning for new products entering the UK and EU markets. Size the initial buy, sequence against lead times and launch dates, and translate it into clean PO recommendations
• Take forecasting models, demand signals, and algorithmic recommendations developed by the team and operationalize them. Apply judgement on top, raise issues when the model is wrong, and feed real-world execution learnings back to improve the models
• Manage POs end-to-end. Generate, adjust, expedite, and follow up with vendors and internal stakeholders to ensure on-time, in-full delivery against launch dates
• Partner closely with merchandising on assortment and launch calendars, and with sourcing and production on lead times, capacity, vendor allocation, and PO execution. These are your primary day-to-day partners
• Build and nurture strong working relationships with partners directly. Communicate constraints clearly, hold them accountable to commitments, escalate constructively when needed, and become the partner they prioritize when capacity is tight
• Work as part of a global planning community. Share intelligence with planning counterparts in the US and other geographies, lift and adapt their analogs and learnings into UK and EU plans, and escalate cross-market issues quickly
• Build and maintain the operational artifacts (trackers, dashboards, status notes) that give the rest of the business confidence in launch readiness and post-launch performance
• Stand up and continuously refine the launch planning rhythm. What gets reviewed pre-launch, what gets tracked post-launch, and how decisions get made when the data says something the plan didn't predict
• Surface trade-offs early and frame them sharply so decisions get made fast and stick

Required

• 8+ years in inventory, demand, supply, or merchandise planning, ideally within a DTC, e-commerce, or multi-category retail business with frequent product launches
• A track record of building strong, trust-based relationships with vendors, cross-functional partners, planners, merch, site and marketing teams and build planning processes. Excellent cross-functional communicator. Can write a tight launch readout, push back on a merchant with data, and tell a vendor a hard truth without burning the relationship.
• Comfortable working at pace and at depth simultaneously. Can hold a strategic view of where the launch portfolio is heading while also knowing the status of every individual PO in flight.
• Direct, hands-on experience sizing launch buys for new products.Experience reading early sell-through data on new products and triggering replen decisions fast. 
• Strong working knowledge of forecasting and replenishment logics applied to new-product contexts and the quantitative literacy to challenge, trust, and operate algorithmic recommendations developed by data and analytics partners.
• Demonstrated experience managing POs end-to-end with global vendors. Generating, expediting, adjusting, and chasing down resolution.
• Experience using and implementing AI in day to day is a must

Preferred

• Direct experience planning in a launch market, new geography, or new business line. You've stood up planning rhythms where none existed and built the scaffolding while running the cycle. Experienced launches or fast scaleups in a planning function for a DTC or retail brand into a new geography, especially UK or EU
• Background at a high-growth DTC or e-commerce brand with global sourcing, especially across Asia
• Familiarity with NetSuite, Anaplan, or comparable planning and ERP systems
• Data fluency and ability to pull what you need without waiting on the data team
• Experience working across mixed lead-time profiles (e.g. fast replenishment plus long-lead overseas)
• Background in fashion, home, or other category-rich verticals where the launch-replen cadence is the dominant rhythm