VP, Merchandise Planning, Allocation & Inventory Management

What the Role Is

Babylist is creating a new VP of Merchandise Planning, Allocation, and Inventory Management to own how the company plans, buys, and allocates inventory as it scales beyond $1B in merchandise revenue. This is a net-new leadership role, reporting to the CFO/COO and sitting alongside senior functional leaders across Merchandising, Supply Chain, and Data/Finance. The VP will own the strategic vision, operating standards, and systems roadmap for Planning. The mandate: give Babylist's planning function a clear point of view, faster decisions, and enough operational rigor to deliver a great customer experience and financial results through inventory. This role is remote and open anywhere in the US, with a preference for West Coast candidates.

Who You Are

• Proven executive leadership of a merchandise planning, inventory management, and allocation function at a wholesale retail business across hundreds of vendors, ideally $500M to $2B+, through double-digit growth
• A strong people manager with a track record of building a high-performance team culture: setting clear expectations, coaching direct reports toward promotion-ready capability, and building bench strength as the team scales.
• A track record of setting strategic vision and operating standards for a planning organization: defining what "great" looks like, not just executing against someone else's model.
• Demonstrated speed and conviction in high-stakes decisions (org design, staffing, systems investments) and the discipline to hold those decisions through execution
• Experience building the planning point of view behind allocation as we expand the distribution network, the inventory deployment and drop-ship strategy that comes with adding fulfillment nodes.
• Direct experience owning a demand planning or allocation platform implementation (e.g., Intuendi, Blue Yonder, o9, ToolsGroup, Impact Analytics) through to full adoption, closing the gap between "live" and "t