Director, Strategic Growth – Key Accounts Garan, Inc., a leading children's apparel company and retail supplier, is seeking a highly driven, entrepreneurial commercial leader to accelerate growth across our most important strategic customer relationships, with an immediate focus on a leading national mass-market retailer. This is a growth leadership role within the children's apparel industry, not a traditional account-management position. Supported by an established account-management and execution team, the Director, Strategic Growth – Key Accounts will be responsible for identifying and creating new business opportunities across children's and baby apparel. The role will focus on identifying whitespace in customer assortments, anticipating consumer and fashion trends, developing differentiated product and merchandising concepts, strengthening senior-level merchant relationships, and converting insights into meaningful business wins. The successful candidate will combine a strong apparel merchant mindset with exceptional selling skills, product curiosity, competitive intelligence, and the ability to move quickly from insight to commercial opportunity. You are a merchant and business builder at heart. You are naturally curious about children's apparel, consumers, products, fabrics, graphics, trends, pricing, retail assortments, and competitors—and you turn that curiosity into commercial action. You don't wait for a buyer to issue a request before developing an idea. You continuously study the marketplace, shop stores and competitive assortments, identify opportunities, and work with internal design and merchandising teams to develop compelling solutions. You are comfortable challenging conventional thinking, presenting customers with ideas they haven't asked for yet, and mobilizing cross-functional teams around opportunities with meaningful growth potential. You are competitive, commercially creative, persistent, and accountable for results. Most importantly, you have the drive to identify opportunities others miss and the persistence to turn those opportunities into winning apparel programs. During your first year, you will be expected to deepen relationships with merchants and senior leaders at key retail customers, accelerate growth with a leading national mass-market retailer, build a qualified pipeline of new children's apparel products, programs, categories, and assortment opportunities, establish a consistent flow of commercially viable product and merchandising ideas, win incremental programs and assortment expansion, grow Garan's shelf presence and market share, increase the quality and frequency of strategic customer engagement, build greater proactivity and accountability across the account-management team, establish regular executive-level business reviews, and build a repeatable approach to competitive shopping, trend identification, assortment analysis, and whitespace development. For candidates based in the New York City market, the anticipated base salary range is approximately $175,000–$200,000, depending on experience and qualifications. Garan is a children's apparel company and supplier with a long history of developing products and programs for major retailers. Our business brings together design, merchandising, product development, sourcing, planning, and customer expertise to create compelling children's apparel assortments for consumers. The Director, Strategic Growth – Key Accounts will have the opportunity to shape the future of some of Garan's most important retail partnerships. Rather than simply managing existing business, this leader will help determine where we grow next, what products and programs we should create, and how we can win in an intensely competitive children's apparel marketplace.
