Melissa Richards

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT MELISSA RICHARDS

As Junior Merchandiser at Le Col, I support the Head of Department directly and have amazing exposure and opportunity within the business and industry. I manage the planning and forecasting to budget and phasing needs, whilst working with suppliers to ensure POs are raised and are on track for in season and upcoming season trading. In my first 5 months I have coordinated and executed data migration to a new ERP system and trained and developed Merchandising Admin Assistant, whilst supporting them in a new career path for successful navigation in the world of merchandising. My skills are in forecasting, planning, trading and reporting as well as data migration, project managing, e-commerce, retail, team training and product launching. The main platforms I have experience in are Navision/Moda, Oracle/Netsuite, Centric PLM, Power BI and a confident SAP Hybris user as well as advanced Excel user. I am currently undertaking not only a full-time degree in Business and Management at Birkbeck, University of London, but also focusing on my full-time career by driving the departments and collections to their full potential, with pre-emptive scenario planning and consistantly offering solutions from current trading to 3 to 4 season planning as well as past season reviews and analysis. The beauty of taking on this degree at my age and stage in my career is that I get to put everything in to practice in real time, helping me make the most efficient decisions and have the confidence in my role. I love challenging myself and improving business practices and methodology, I regularly apply my learnings to my role and believe in knowledge share to improve innovation and co-creation.I managed the Lifestyle and Explore department at Rapha. I enjoyed the opportunity to work cross-functionally within the business. My time at Rapha saw me training admin assistants, colleagues in other departments from admin to senior management in various areas of merchandising and e-commerce merchandising. I was also a business champion of diversity and inclusivity. I was enrolled on a circular economy course to learn and apply methods to make my role and the effects of my decisions sustainable with the aim of reducing waste and focus on continual use of resources, to ensure these are profitable, sustainable and not wasteful. As a result, in 2022, I was made the strategy lead role to reduce waste and excess, along side my day to day. My motivation driver is aquiring knowledge and learning new processes, I\'m highly self-motivated but also more than happy to drive motivation in others.