<p>Head of Media committee, Creative Head for the Rotaract Club, Core Committee member for annual national cultural fest</p>

<ul><li>Led the category sales, marketing, and the category P&amp;L, including pricing policy, business planning, inventory management, merchandising, customer experience, marketing and operations of Flipkart Kids Fashion.</li><li>Handled the assortment planning and served as OTB owner; worked with buyers to build healthy inventory while maintaining regional utilization efficiency and inventory holding norms.</li><li>Enhanced customer experience by using platform-based levers, customer journey, improved product discoverability, targeted offers, discount laddering, efficiency in search and merchandising flow.</li><li>Delivered 80% YoY growth in FY21 while also achieving significant bottom-line improvements; developed an optimized pricing model (led to 3% improvement in margin while delivering topline).</li><li>Improved inventory health by ensuring inwards of high selling categories, reduced aged inventory by 40% through targeted pricing, clearance sales, and cross-promotions.</li></ul>

Category Sell Head, Kids Fashion

<ul><li>Headed the category and P&amp;L of Sephora Collection, Sephora’s own brand.</li><li>Took assortment planning, what is to be launched in Sephora India and pricing for all categories, including makeup, skincare, accessories, and bath and body.</li><li>Handled buying and inventory management; international buying to ensure sales growth while maintaining inventory norms; allocation to stores as per sale trends and seasonality.</li><li>Oversaw merchandising and planogram (in-store and online); designing the shade-wise planogram for all categories based on customer preferences and sale trends.</li><li>Managed in-store and online marketing for Sephora; planned and executed activities on social media, e-commerce, PR, in-store to drive brand objectives and increase engagement.</li><li>Led the brand to 47% YoY growth with 12% LTL while bringing down the inventory cover from 8.4 months to 5.5 months for FY 2018-2019.</li><li>Launched the Sephora India Gift Card Program.</li><li>Designed and launched the Sephora Captain Initiative, a talent development program for retail staff across India to provide superior customer service.</li></ul>

Senior Manager, Category Management

<ul><li>Handled business planning including setting the sales plans, budgets, providing inputs for business development and ensuring adherence to the plan.</li><li>Fed the category teams with analytics on promotions, incentives and strategy based on the performance of sub-categories, colors, shades, and SKUs.</li><li>Set norms, placed orders, worked with global supply chain for timely supply, ensured appropriate allocation of stock from warehouse to the stores.</li><li>Managed business intelligence and MIS; set up the master database, formats for analysis, reviews. Sent out regular reports to all departments in the business globally.</li><li>Played key role in the setup of Sephora India’s category, planning and supply chain divisions while closely working with Arvind’s leadership team.</li><li>Optimized the overall inventory cover of business from 17.2 months to 7.8 months in FY 2016-2017.</li><li>Created automated tools for data analytics, ordering, and replenishment which reduced the time of operational activities by ~560 man hours p.a. </li><li>Launched the Sephora India Beauty Pass Loyalty program, responsible for running targeted and personalized campaigns, data analytics on customer understanding.</li></ul>

Manager, Planning & Analytics

<ul><li>Implemented the concept-to-shelf fashion calendar which focused on sharper design, working capital optimization and improving processes from the design stage to product development, buying and sales.</li><li>Handled the alignment of costs, MRPs and gross margins; responsible for target setting and achievement by ensuring detailing of costs and correct pricing of products.</li><li>Ensured efficient markdown management, including tracking sales of brands, proposing plans for the slow movers to improve in-season sell-through and gross margin realization for the business.</li><li>Created scalable tools and processes, formats, tracking mechanisms, training modules. The revamped calendar was piloted in Flying Machine and then scaled across the Arvind portfolio such as US Polo Assn and Arrow.</li><li>Achieved gross margin uplift of 3% in FY 2015-16 by implementing the new projects in US Polo Assn, Flying Machine (driven by improvement in sell-through and reduction in costs).</li><li>Created a tool for automatically classifying all styles within a brand based on rate-of-sale and projected sellthrough which enabled easy discount planning by identifying the slow-movers.</li><li>Created a tool to optimize the price-option grid for the season. This tool employs the Pareto principle and histograms to compute the optimum range for the season.</li></ul>

Assistant Manager, Planning & Analytics, Central Strategy Team

Ajoy Anand Menon

English (British)

Ajoy Anand Menon is an e-commerce manager with over seven yrs of experience in retail and e-commerce across fashion and beauty with expertise in P&L management, business planning, merchandising, inventory, supply chain, pricing, and marketing. He manages the P&L of Kids Fashion at Flipkart as a category sell head. At Sephora, he served as a senior manager responsible for planning and execution of activities on social media, e-commerce, PR, and in-store to drive brand objectives and increase engagement. Anand also has experience in analytics.

Ajoy Anand Menon

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