Retail Area Manager - South East

At Lakeland, our stores are the heart of how customers experience our brand. We are looking for a Retail Area Manager to lead our South East stores (covering stores from Norwich, to the south coast), working closely with Store Managers to drive commercial performance, strengthen standards and deliver the warm, helpful service Lakeland is known for.

This is a hands-on multi-site leadership role. You will lead a group of stores, coach and develop Store Managers, and turn our retail priorities into clear action across your area. You will need to be commercially sharp, confident using data, comfortable challenging performance and able to build strong relationships with store teams and central support functions.

Overall Purpose of the Role

To lead and manage a group of stores and their managers to deliver Lakeland’s strategic goals, achieving commercial, operational, and customer targets while keeping extraordinary service at the heart of decision making.

You will act as the key link between stores and strategy, turning business priorities into practical store actions and feeding back insights that help shape future plans.

Scope of the Role

• To lead, coach, develop, inspire and manage the performance of stores in your area working with Store Managers to improve/enhance performance over all KPI’s.
• To ensure store managers deliver against retail objectives, manage their P&L effectively and develop growing partnerships with 3rd party customers.
• Scope of responsibility around 15-18 stores.

Major Accountabilities of Role

• Lead, manage, inspire, and coach and hold accountable a high performing population of store managers, coaching and developing them to ensure that they, together with their teams, consistently deliver extraordinary customer service and effectively manage the P&L & all retail KPI’s
• Input into and take ownership for the delivery of the Retail strategy within your area, based on external trends and internal observations. Maximising growth opportunities and by being the key conduit between stores and strategy
• Identify trends in store and estate-wide performance (informed by robust data analysis and in-depth conversations with Store Managers) and use these insights to manage store performance and help Lakeland respond effectively to opportunities and challenges in the marketplace
• Take accountability for driving improvement through area KPIs, managing by exception and using data led insights to guide decision making and performance improvement activity alongside the coaching interventions that support them. Lead - plan, do, review routines
• Effectively manage the end-to-end delivery of all projects impacting retail stores with a hands on, proactive and organised approach – co-creating the design, approach and implementation in a way that minimises impact on stores, and delights the customer
• Work in partnership with cross functional teams e.g. marketing & visual merchandising, to define and manage the critical path for new store openings, delivering against expectation, on time and within budget & also any cross functional projects or events. Be the VM Beacon with visually stunning stores.
• In partnership with the Property & Facilities team and landlords effectively manage the retail store estate maintaining consistent and safe store standards and ensuring compliance activity is completed in full. All Stores Operationally compliant
• Build mutually beneficial partnerships with external parties e.g. shopping centres, and garden centres, to drive footfall and sales. Develop B2B relationships
• Ensure stock control is in place & labour optimised. Any discrepancies or cost issues are controlled and followed up on as these are the 2 biggest areas of cost control