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Salary: Competitive + Car Allowance & Benefits
Working Pattern: Full Time
Contract Type: Permanent
Head of Retail - South
As a Head of Retail, you’ll set the strategic direction for part of Matalan’s UK store estate in the South, empowering Regional Managers to deliver strong commercial results, operational excellence, and an exceptional omni-channel customer experience.
You will play a pivotal role in representing retail across the business, enhancing cross-functional alignment, and ensuring the retail perspective informs key decisions and drives performance. Reporting directly to the Chief Retail Officer (CRO) and working alongside your fellow Head of Retail, you’ll drive leadership across retail with pace, consistency, commerciality, and accountability.
This role will be a mix of spending time with your store teams out on the road, home working for the days that require project work, and time at our Support Hub in Knowsley to help you stay connected - All in perfect balance.
About Matalan
At Matalan, we believe looking stylish and making your home feel great shouldn't cost the earth.
From humble beginnings in the North West over 40 years ago, we've grown into one of the UK's best known fashion and homeware retailers, serving millions of customers across the UK and internationally. We might have grown, but we've stayed true to who we are - hardworking, down to earth, and always focused on giving our customers great quality, style, and value they can rely on.
We know as a team, we are stronger together – we champion equality for all and make lasting connections that go beyond work. We thrive off our inclusive culture, encouraging our colleagues to bring their true selves to work and contributing to collective creativity, open-mindedness, and growth.
Modern, Stylish, Great Quality and Value - We're in our New Matalan Era, and we'd love you to join us - whether that's as a candidate or customer, we're confident you'll love where we're heading!
Key Responsibilities
Retail Strategy and Execution
- Lead the operational delivery of Matalan’s retail strategy across your regions, aligned to the 5-year plan and key business priorities.
- Drive consistent execution of the retail plan through one best way, ensuring strong EBITDA performance and high standards of visual execution.
- Translate strategic goals into clear operational actions that drive performance, consistency, and a great customer experience across all stores.
- Own performance across key retail KPIs including sales, profit, productivity, customer satisfaction, and colleague engagement.
- Own the execution of the new and refresh store programme across regions, as a key part of the business strategy.
- Drive agility and pace, adapting interventions to meet local performance trends, customer needs, and opportunities.
- Own and lead Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) across regions, ensuring robust performance discussions, clear accountability, and aligned action plans that address risks, unlock opportunities, and deliver the business plan.
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Leadership and Team Development
- Lead, coach, and inspire a team of Regional Managers, building a high-performing, commercially capable leadership team.
- Create a culture of continuous learning, inclusion, and accountability where leaders feel empowered to make decisions and lead with confidence.
- Strengthen succession across retail by identifying, developing, and retaining high-potential talent and building out the long-term succession for our new stores and future pipeline.
- Role model and lead Matalan’s values through consistent, purposeful leadership, setting the cultural tone across retail and championing the values as they are launched across the business.
- Champion colleague engagement and ensure teams feel supported, connected, and valued.
Customer and Commercial Focus
- Drive a customer-first mindset, raising standards, and ensuring a consistently great shopping experience.
- Lead commercial execution across regions, partnering with buying, customer, and visual merchandising (VM) teams to activate campaigns and tailor activity to customer needs.
- Hold full P&L responsibility for your regions, identifying opportunities to improve cost, productivity, and profitability.
- Influence pricing, promotional, and trading decisions through clear insight and regional expertise.
Operational Excellence
- Collaborate with the Director of Retail Operations to embed “One Best Way” processes, enabling consistency, efficiency, and high-quality execution.
- Use insight and data to drive continuous improvement, simplify processes, and remove barriers to performance.
- Lead delivery of the shrink, risk, and compliance agenda across stores, ensuring strong governance and ownership to deliver the shrink plan.
- Ensure operational readiness for new store formats, technology enhancements, and future omnichannel capabilities.
- Maintain retail business continuity, ensuring smooth and effective day-to-day operations.
Cross-functional Collaboration
- Act as the primary retail interface into key business areas, ensuring retail has a strong voice in shaping initiatives, decisions, and priorities.
- Work closely with property and store development on store refreshes, new openings, and site plans.
- Collaborate with trading, customer, VM, finance, people, and supply chain to ensure retail considerations are embedded early and decisions land effectively in stores.
- Represent retail in business-wide planning forums, ensuring stores are set up to deliver new models, trials, and transformation activity.
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KPIs and Measures of Success
- Stores sales and EBITDA performance
- Commercial KPIs
- Customer satisfaction and NPS
- Shrink and risk compliance
- Colleague engagement and leadership capability
- Regional consistency, pace, and quality of execution
Experience
Leadership and Growth Planning
- Beneficial experience would be to have worked in a similar level role in a Retail / Fashion business, to help you hit the ground running from the outset.
- Experience leading large-scale, multi-site retail operations across multiple regions with accountability for commercial and people performance.
- Proven track record of building and developing high-performing teams and driving empowerment and accountability with senior leaders.
- Experience shaping and embedding culture across a dispersed workforce.
- Strong experience partnering with senior stakeholders up to board level on business decisions, change programmes, and investment priorities.
Commercial Acumen
- Strong commercial instincts with the ability to interpret insight, drive action, and influence change at pace.
- Deep understanding of store operations and the levers that drive sales, profit, and customer experience.
- Demonstrated ability to optimise P&L performance through cost control, productivity improvements, and commercial activation.
Collaboration and Stakeholder Management
- Skilled at influencing senior stakeholders and working collaboratively across functions.
- Proven experience delivering cross-functional projects and landing operational change effectively.
- Strong, clear communication skills with the ability to engage, align, and challenge when needed.
Analytical and Insight-Driven
- Demonstrates deep capability in analysing data, insight, and customer feedback to diagnose root causes and inform high-quality decisions.
- Able to simplify complexity, identify root causes, and communicate clear actions.
Benefits
- Car or Car Allowance
- Generous Company Bonus
- Healthcare - Self and Family
- Great pension
- Birthday Early Finish
- Volunteering day
- 20% Discount for you and a friend
& Lot's more..
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