Nike Marketplace Merchandising: four assignments in nine months

What it is

Nike split merchandising into category merchandising and a new marketplace function. The channel received one Best and Better catalog no matter what a retailer stood for.

His own word for the year was evolution. "Over the course of 9 months, I have had 4 significant role and account base changes."

What Khounlavong did

• Finish Line, second quarter: the first door segmentation with planning, a three-year merchandising strategy, and a store teardown in Indianapolis.
• City Specialty and boutiques, third quarter: the City Specialty Assortment Rollout Strategy, 11 versions in five weeks, sorting accounts into six groups with a season-by-season handover from catalogs to built assortments.
• Hibbett and Shoe Palace, fourth quarter: the door cluster framework, built on the retailer's own three consumer profiles, with a muse door for each cluster.
• Took Nike's Create the Future merchandising reorganization to each account, rewriting the internal deck in the retailer's language.
• Led the marketplace merchandising session at the city specialty summit in Las Vegas, February 2016.
• Grew from one direct report to four, and wrote the job profiles for the merchants he hired.
• Raised productivity and profitability 35% across three key retail partners.
• Sped up the new functional process so that product landed 10 days before launch.
• Told Hibbett, "You are three different companies," Fashion, Athletic and Sport, and built a cluster for each.
• Held that the work was about getting a retailer to a more informed starting point, not dictating what to buy.

Results

• The City Specialty strategy and the Door Cluster Framework are both recorded as completed in his review.

At a glance