Fashion

Lifestyle

Streetwear

Health & Fitness

Highly accomplished and results-driven retail executive with an extensive track record of delivering the key leadership, strategies, and insights to take global sales and brand performance to new levels of success. Excel at building, training, and optimizing the productivity of large-scale teams spread across multiple locations. Adept at creating dynamic strategies to position brands as dominant forces within highly competitive markets and drive impressive revenue/profit growth. Skilled at partnering with internal and external stakeholders to create synergy and achieve ambitious business objectives. Focused on driving continuous improvement to raise the bar for both standards and performance to create best in class business models. Multilingual: fluent in English and Afrikaans with basic proficiency in Dutch, German, and Spanish.

Core Strengths
• Executive-Level Leadership
• Merchandising Management
• Strategic Planning & Analysis
• Competitive Intelligence
• Brand Development & Management

• Retail Operations Management
• Budgeting & Cost Control
• Product Development & Launch
• Supply Chain Management
• Continuous Improvement

• Team Building & Leadership
• Talent Recruitment & Retention
• Staff Training & Development
• Performance Management
• Negotiation & Persuasion

Fast-tracked to the VP/GMM role in under eight months. Answer directly to the CEO and COO while serving as the driving force behind a highly skilled team of 40+ optimizing the performance of the Men's' and Kid's business segments (60% private label/40% branded), delivering $1.5B+ annually across both Sears and Kmart stores.
Select Contributions/Achievements:
• Fully own profit & loss responsibility, sales forecasting & planning, growth strategy development, and more.
• Playing a key leadership role in the ongoing process of transitioning the company to the private sector.
• Tapped by top leadership to serve as a strategic business partner and successfully navigate the company through the Chapter 11 process during a critical period for the company.
? Adeptly transformed the business model by redefining processes, roles, and responsibilities to increase capabilities and maximize returns.
? Re-engaged with over 45 international suppliers/partnerships and successfully reinvigorated overall performance of domestic brands and vendors to achieve positive EBITDA three quarters in a row.
• Grew margin ahead of chain while reducing overall assortment by 25%.

Vice President/General Merchandise Manager

Given the mandate to take brand performance within US markets to new levels of performance with full oversight of a team of direct reports that included the Head of Planning, National Retail Manager, and National Visual Manager.
Select Contributions/Achievements:
•	Aggressively expanded the brand throughout the US and opened 10 new stores in California to net consistent comparative growth each quarter as well as strong year-on-year (YoY) EBITDA growth.


Country Brand Manager - Kids

Spearheaded the key holding company's ambitious brand launch and growth strategy, delivering 15 new brands to market while leveraging different models (Joint Venture, Consignment, & Wholesale) to maximize each brand's performance. Directly controlled all brand planning, budgeting, forecasting, profitability, and reporting. 

Select Contributions/Achievements:
•	Adeptly forecasted, developed, and managed the annual $70M+ sales plan, capitalizing on emerging trends to drive substantial revenue and market share growth across both branded and private labels.
•	Designed and implemented highly effective brand communication strategies and partnered with branded vendors/companies to prioritize assortment needs by product category, brand, and location. 
•	Recruited, built, trained, and led a dynamic leadership team that formed the foundational core, which has continued to sustain the success begun during this period.
•	Strategized pricing, intake margins, stock turn, markdowns, and terminal stock forecasting while ensuring all retail spaces employed a "right product, right location" method to maximize retail selling space results.
•	Expanded the total ladies' portfolio from 14 to 26 brands, which increased Branded Ladieswear market share from 1.7% to 3.9% with no cannibalization of total ladieswear. 
•	Delivered comparable YoY sales growth of 7% vs Company at level to LY as well as 79% fiscal year growth.
•	Increased average units sales across the entire portfolio of brands by 17%.


Divisional Merchandise Manager: Head of Buying (International Brands, Edgars)

Positioned Watch Station International as a disruptive force within a highly competitive market space while delivering the key leadership to optimize the performance of 47 store teams and three Area Managers. Directed multiple cross-functional teams at the Head Office comprised of Planning, Buying, and Store Operations Specialists. 
Select Contributions/Achievements:
•	Expertly managed $2M in UK retail concessions and successfully grew overall business 15 points (-9% to +5%) within the first year, with profit, inclusive of cost of shop fits, increasing by 1%.
•	Orchestrated the rebranding of seven stores to New Nameplate and Service Standards.
•	Refocused all personnel on delivering the highest standard of customer service, leading to mystery shopping scores rising dramatically from 65% to 88% in one year and conversions growing from 3% to 8%.

Director of Sales, 2009 – 2011
Promoted to oversee $85M+ in annual sales targets across branded products that included Armani, Burberry, DKNY, Diesel, Michael Kors, Fossil, and Marc by Marc Jacobs among others.
Select Contributions/Achievements:
•	Met/exceeded sales budgets both years and catalyzing 11% in revenue growth .
•	Successfully introduced Fossil watch brands to the UK market and grew the brands to represent 52% of total fashion watch market share. 
•	Raised the bar for merchandising standards across all brands to create a distinctive global standard and slash the overall global sku count.

Additional experience as Divisional Head of Fashion Brands (2005-2009), Fossil UK 

Director of Concessions, 2011 – 2012

Find out detailed information about Graham Cundick,  in San Francisco, CA

Graham Cundick: in San Francisco, CA

Graham Cundick

Trinity College London