Job description
At Backcountry, our mission is to connect people to their passions. Our four online stores—Backcountry, Competitive Cyclist, MotoSport and, SteepandCheap—aim to supply our customers with the gear, knowledge, and inspiration necessary to get out there and chase down life’s greatest moments. We do this by providing the biggest and best assortment of premium outdoor products, a superior shopping experience, personalized Gearhead expertise, lightning-fast and accurate fulfillment, and inspirational, informative, and community-centered content.
The Associate Buyer – Women’s and Youth Soft Goods plays a key role on the Merchandising team, driving financial results through thoughtful product curation, vendor partnerships, and strategic inventory management. In this fast-paced and highly collaborative role, you’ll balance creativity with analysis—building compelling assortments, shaping promotional strategies, and ensuring an exceptional customer experience. Reporting to the Sr. Merchandise Manager, Women’s & Youth, this position offers the opportunity to take initiative, grow your expertise, and contribute to a dynamic, evolving business. This role is challenging – above and beyond the day-to-day responsibilities, you’ll have a big role within a fast-paced team.
This is a hybrid role with 3 days in our office in Cottonwood Heights, Utah.
What you get to do every day:
- Assortment Selection: Curate seasonal product assortments, balancing pricing, category mix, brand mix, and inventory selection.
- Vendor Management & Negotiations: Build and maintain strong vendor relationships, handling terms, discounts, pricing, promotional periods, compliance, image usage, price matching, and exclusive buys.
- Purchase Order (PO) Management: Create and manage purchase orders including SKU setup, style/color/size allocation, and dollar/quantity planning. Ensure on-time submissions, track edits, resolve past-due orders, and oversee pre-season and ASAP orders.
- Pricing & Promotions: Partner with manager to define preseason and in-season pricing and promotional strategies. Build promotional calendars, manage cadence, select product for campaigns, and ensure setup accuracy. Oversee promo functionality, price matching, in-season price breaks, and end-of-season markdowns. Monitor performance, communicate updates across teams, and identify risks or opportunities to maximize results.
- Inventory Management: Align with Planning on preseason receipt flow, assortment allocation, and sell-through targets. Drive strategies for slow-moving and aged inventory, manage vendor RTVs/markdowns, and ensure inventory aligns with company financial goals.
- Online Merchandising: Optimize product presentation across the site, including imagery, taxonomy, facets, and product boosting/sort order. Manage cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and oversee backorders to improve the customer experience.
- AI & Automation: Identify opportunities to automate recurring reports and routine analysis using AI tools or workflow platforms, and help implement or maintain these solutions. Support the team by suggesting ways technology and automation can make day-to-day tasks faster, more accurate, and less manual.
- This overview isn’t exhaustive—we’re always evolving, and your responsibilities will too. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to take initiative, grow your role, and explore new ideas.
What you bring to the role:
- 2+ years of relevant industry merchandising and buying experience
- Experience in outdoor brands and merchandising preferred
- Willingness and ability to travel to as needed
- Solid foundation of retail math and buying fundamentals
- Proficient in Microsoft Office (proficiency in Excel a must)
- Excellent organizational skills and extreme attention to detail
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Strong analytical skills
- Outstanding time management skills
- Ability to perform under pressure and prioritize competing tasks/initiatives
What’s in it for you? Joining Backcountry isn’t just about having a seat at the table—it’s about helping redesign the table entirely. You’ll be challenged, stretched, and supported as you grow faster than you thought possible. In addition to competitive compensation, we offer:
- Executive Access: Work directly with brand CEOs and senior leadership, solving real business problems and earning mentorship from top operators.
- AI-First Skill Building: Get hands-on with the most advanced AI tools in the market. From automation to prompt engineering, you’ll build a modern tech stack that sets you apart in any industry.
- Accelerated Career Path: High performers are quickly entrusted with greater responsibility, new challenges, and leadership opportunities across our portfolio of brands.
- Competitive benefits: Paid time off policies, 401(k)/RRSP match, medical/dental/vision and a variety of supplemental policies, and employee discounts at our portfolio companies
What our interview process looks like:
- 📞Step 1: If you align with our vision and meet the qualifications, we’ll reach out to schedule a conversation and introduce Backcountry.
- 🧠Step 2: You’ll complete a short AI or product-building challenge so we can understand how you approach problems and execution.
- 💬Step 3: Participate in deep-dive interviews with Backcountry leadership focused on your experience, product mindset, and operational thinking.
- 📩Step 4: Offer. We’ll move fast for the right candidate.
The CSC family of brands provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, provincial, state or local laws.
The CSC family of brands is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact [email protected].
