Demand & Strategic Planning Manager

Job Description Role Type: Full-time Report to: Chief Operating Officer Wage: Salary, starting at $92k/year Location: San Francisco, on-site/flexible Demand & Strategic Planning Manager About Us Dandelion Chocolate is a bean-to-bar chocolate factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. We make chocolate from only two ingredients, cocoa beans and cane sugar, and travel to origins as often as we can to build good, trusting relationships with the producers who grow and ferment the beans we buy. The journey a bean takes to become a bar (or confection, experience, gift, or hot chocolate) involves careful planning and tracking that is almost inevitably accompanied by surprises: marketing plans change; demand fluctuates unexpectedly, finished goods arrive out of schedule, packaging components are held up in customs. Our small but mighty team looks to our Inventory & Strategic Planning Manager to forecast the sales of our items and ensure we have the right products in the right places at the right times in the right amount. Additionally, our Inventory & Strategic Planning Manager will help answer various types of "what if" questions to determine the most profitable course of action across an array of choices. About the Role You are a critical member of the broader Inventory Management team at the hub of all business operations - production, receiving, retail, wholesale and our online store with oversight of finished goods - ensuring we don’t sell what we won’t have, we continuously sell what we do have, and we don’t say an item is out of stock when it is readily available. You work across multiple systems (SKULabs, Square, Shopify, Looker, remote warehouse inventory systems, home-grown tools, etc.) to provide thoughtful and accurate business intelligence reports with reliable numbers that drive our plans and financials. Additionally, you will partner closely with our Product Management, Creative, and Marketing teams to come up with accurate expectations for new item sales and profit based on historical sales from similar items, seasonality, and marketing efforts. A Typical Day in the Life No two days are alike! You review with Product Management concepts for proposed new items to launch in 9 months to develop sales expectations. Next is a meeting to review a change to our digital marketing spend strategy for the rest of this month, to ensure inventory needs are aligned. In the afternoon, you are due to send six-month forecasts to a collaborator, so you review all their sales forecasts and update inventory needs then email the co-manufacturer the revised data. Before wrapping up the day, you reallocate inventory across channels and present to the Exec Team a category level forecast for 2028 based on a possible real estate expansion strategy under consideration. About You You love systems, organization, and lean in to reconciling uncertainty (e.g. how much more can we sell if we increase production, when will the port open, why did sales exceed expectations last week) what is working and what needs to be improved. When you don’t have the answers, you will dig into the data or schedule a review with your cross-functional partners to figure it out. You consistently work with your Product Manager partners, partnering on new item development to determine the financial opportunity a new item represents and how that item will affect our overall seasonal rollup. Teamwork, camaraderie, and a little humor when something doesn’t go quite to plan will serve you well in an ever-changing environment like Dandelion. Your Day-To-Day Entails: Forecasting and planning: Create and maintain weekly item-level demand and sales forecasts, and set stock notifications, based on the previous season’s results, seasonality, anticipated marketing impact, potential cannibalization from like-items, etc. Strategize inventory balance targets and inbound delivery flow based upon minimum order quantities, production batch sizes and lead times, availability of chocolate or other raw materials, case pack sizes, etc. Understand and manage the bill of materials for interrelatedness of raw materials and components, including chocolate, packaging, collateral, shipping materials, etc. Oversee product sales life-cycle by participating in launch planning, managing replenishment deliveries and executing sell-down / sell-out strategies. Order Management: Place purchase orders with outside finished goods vendors, packaging / collateral suppliers, cafe supplies manufacturers, etc. Service Level Management: Keep items in stock through inventory balancing across all sales channels and retail locations; monitor marketing efforts to react in-season to unexpected fluctuations in demand, partner #J-18808-Ljbffr 6AM City, LLC