Director of Retail Operations, APAC

OVERVIEW

The Director of Retail Operations, APAC is responsible for ensuring that ALO's global retail strategies are translated into locally relevant, seamlessly executed operations across the region. This role leads in-market Retail Operations Managers, adapting global operating models and rollout plans while ensuring flawless execution across communications, logistics, training, and measurement. This leader operates with a servant mentality towards the field. While reporting into the Global Retail Operations function, this role operates in lock step with our APAC market leadership team to ensure tools, processes, and systems provided to the field work seamlessly. This role will build strong peer-level partnerships with local peers, including Logistics, Loss Prevention, Planning, and Marketing, that allows for empowered decision-making in-region without unnecessary escalation. This role requires strong decision quality – knowing when to adapt, when to call for help, and when to hold the line on global standards.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage cross-functional critical-path milestones for new country enablement activities, maintaining detailed project plans and trackers to drive towards first store business enablement.
• Conduct impact and gap assessment against global operating model, systems, and processes to determine local adaptations for local market.
• Partner with Global Retail Operations team to develop new operating models, processes, and technology changes to adapt to store concept variations, including department store, mall, and freestanding store operating models.
• Partner with local logistics and last mile delivery providers and HQ-based Supply Chain teams to develop fulfillment models customized on a store-by-store basis to meet business needs.
• Support with NSO planning, coordination and training.
• Own and maintain localized Retail Calendar to include local events, holidays, initiative pilots and rollouts, communication campaigns, leveraging Global Retail Calendar as baseline.
• Oversee all store and field leader communications via Zipline communication platform, leveraging global communication content as baseline, managing translation to local language while maintaining feeling and essence of messaging.
• Maintain Zipline Resource Library for country, ensuring that all policies and procedures align to local market expectations and are translated for local consumption.
• Support facilitation of weekly market level field leader meetings, ensuring general alignment with global approach.
• Support planning, logistics, and facilitation of market events in conjunction with field leadership and global teams.
• Own the regional retail calendar, sequencing global and local initiatives around workload, capacity, and market-specific considerations.
• Lead end-to-end execution of global initiatives in-region, ensuring full integration across communications, translations, logistics, training, and measurement.
• Ensure launches are complete, relevant, and seamless to execute prior to reaching stores.
• Measure adoption and execution success, sharing insights with both regional leadership and HQ.
• Build deep store operations expertise through participating in hands-on store process execution and maintain detailed understanding of ALO's policies and procedures.
• Safeguard against siloed or fragmented approaches, ensuring the region reflects ALO's global brand, standards, and culture.
• Build strong peer-level relationships with regional leaders across Logistics, Loss Prevention, Planning, Buying, Technology, Merchandising, and Marketing.
• Identify opportunities for process improvements to simplify execution and drive labor efficiencies while maximizing business and operations performance.
• Support solution design, testing, and policy and procedure development for operational rollouts.
• Demonstrate strong decision quality: knowing which processes and policies can flex, which must hold, and when to escalate to global leadership.
• Regularly review operational KPIs at store level and partner with field leader and store teams to drive KPI improvements and delivery against KPI expectations. Responsible for driving key operational metrics including Inventory Accuracy, Shrink, and Recovery/Replenishment Rates.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Minimum of 10 years in multi-country retail operations management across APAC, with a focus on execution in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and NZ. Experience at a global brand preferred.
• Proven project management skills and the ability to thoughtfully develop and manage against detailed timelines.
• Self-starter with ability to identify issues, propose solutions, and implement improvements
• Ability to support a non-traditional work schedule (including holidays and weekends) to support stores, as needed
• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite, especially Excel and PowerPoint
• Ability to travel to retail store locations throughout APAC and HQ office in Los Angeles as needed.