Merchandiser - Strategic Projects

Designation: Merchandiser - Strategic Projects

Central Function: Merchandising/Product

Location: Dubai, UAE

About SUMWON STUDIOS

SUMWON STUDIOS is a global brand house building, scaling and reimagining culturally relevant fashion, lifestyle and consumer brands. Our portfolio includes MISSGUIDED, SUMWON, BALR, Baby Phat, Playboy, AiiRZ, KiZN, KSTM and 11SKNDS.

In just a few years, we have grown from a start-up to one of the fastest-scaling brand platforms in the industry. Combining creativity, data, technology and an agile supply chain, we build brands designed to win in today's digital-first world.

We operate at the intersection of culture, commerce and innovation. Whether launching new brands, acquiring established ones, or unlocking growth opportunities across our portfolio, we move quickly, think globally and challenge conventional ways of working.

The Role

Product drives our business, and this role sits at the intersection of merchandising, data and AI.

You'll build a new product benchmarking methodology from the ground up, helping us understand what drives product performance and how much impact presentation has. Your first major project will focus on comparing traditional studio photography with AI-generated imagery across our UK and Dubai studios, looking at factors such as model, pose, backdrop and styling.

You'll turn this analysis into clear, actionable insights that shape how our teams brief shoots, use AI imagery and make product decisions across the business.

This is a build role, not a caretaking role. You'll have the opportunity to create the approach from scratch, work closely with senior stakeholders and influence how we use data and AI across our growing portfolio of brands.

The role will continue to evolve as new strategic product questions emerge, so we're looking for someone who is commercially curious, comfortable with data and, most importantly, has a genuine understanding of fashion product and why it sells.

Key Responsibilities

Product Benchmarking

• Build the methodology for benchmarking product performance based on the product's own merits, including category, price point, styling and historical performance.
• Establish a reliable benchmark against which studio and creative performance can be measured.
• Analyse whether studio factors including model, pose, backdrop, styling and human versus AI production cause products to over- or under-index against expected performance.
• Own the SKC/SKU-level data sets underpinning the benchmarking methodology.
• Manage product attribution, styling tags and pairing data across brand taxonomies.
• Identify and resolve data quality issues at source before they impact analysis or business decisions.
• Continuously refine the methodology as new data and learnings emerge.

Product & Merchandising Insight

• Bring genuine merchandising judgement to every piece of analysis, grounding findings in why a product sells rather than simply reporting what happened.
• Analyse model, pose, backdrop and styling performance across brands and categories.
• Translate findings into actionable recommendations for studio teams, creative teams and AI-generated imagery.
• As AI-produced imagery scales, provide structured, evidence-led feedback to our external AI imagery partner.
• Design and run rigorous A/B testing across different creative and product presentation approaches.
• Identify emerging product trends, performance patterns and opportunities for further investigation.

Reporting & Stakeholder Influence

• Own the product benchmarking and imagery performance components of the Monthly Business Review.
• Provide senior stakeholders with a single, trusted view of what is driving product performance.
• Turn complex analysis into clear, concise and decision-ready insights rather than data dumps.
• Proactively flag data inconsistencies, methodology risks and assumptions.
• Partner closely with Merchandising, Studio, Creative, Digital Trade and wider commercial teams.
• Act as the day-to-day data and insight point of contact for our external AI imagery partner as the partnership develops.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first quarter:

• A working product benchmark has been built from scratch and is trusted by the business.
• The business has a clear, evidence-led view of how much product performance is driven by the product itself versus studio and creative factors.
• Studio and creative teams are changing how they brief shoots and AI generation based on your findings.
• Commercial and studio leadership are using the benchmark to inform decisions around AI imagery scale-up, including where, how quickly and across which brands it should be deployed.
• The methodology is robust enough to evolve with the business and support the next strategic product question.

What you’ll bring

• A genuine, hands-on understanding of fashion product and merchandising. You can explain why a product sells, not just report that it did.
• Experience in merchandising, planning or product-focused analytics within fashion, ecommerce or a similarly fast-moving consumer environment.
• Strong practical experience working with large and complex data sets.
• Advanced Excel skills and confidence working with complex formulas and data manipulation.
• Experience with SQL, Python and/or BI tools would be beneficial.
• A strong commercial mindset and ability to connect analysis to business performance.
• Curiosity and confidence around AI-driven workflows, with a willingness to get hands-on and learn quickly.
• The ability to build a methodology from a blank page and work confidently where there isn't an established playbook.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to present complex findings clearly to senior stakeholders.
• Based in Dubai, with a willingness to collaborate closely with our UK and Dubai teams.

What we'll bring

• 25 days annual leave, increasing to 30 days after your first year
• 30% employee discount across SUMWON STUDIOS brands
• Ongoing learning and development opportunities
• Company social events
• The opportunity to work with a high-performing team building brands at global scale

Why Join Us?

This is an opportunity to join a business in growth mode. You'll have the chance to make a visible impact, take ownership, move quickly and help shape the future of a multi-brand platform operating across global markets.