Group Lead of Procurement and Inventory
Bloom & Wild
Operations
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Posted on Dec 11, 2024
bloomon is turning the flower industry on its head – for the better. How? By disrupting the traditional supply chain! We skip the auction and wholesale, to shorten the journey for our flowers. And we harness technology, brand and innovation to deliver gifts and subscriptions that delight our customers across Europe.
We launched in Amsterdam in 2014, and in 2021 joined forces with Bloom & Wild, the UK's fastest growing ecommerce company (according to the Financial Times). Our group is backed by top tier investors and is now home to a family of 3 strong brands, Bloom & Wild, bloomon and Bergamotte. Together, we’ve delivered over 20 million orders (and counting!), making us the largest direct to consumer flower business in Europe.
Our vision is to create the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful. And we won't stop at flowers and plants. Starting with the Bloom & Wild brand, we're expanding our gifting offering to other categories like cakes, candles and cocktails. This is all part of our ambition to build Europe's #1 direct to consumer gifting destination.
We care wildly about people and our planet. Which is why we’re so proud to be a certified B Corp™ – committed to making long-term positive change for our community, and the world around us.
🛠️ Operations @ Bloom & Wild Group
The Operations team at bloomon and Bloom & Wild is split into two sub-teams, although in practice there is a close collaboration between all these sub-teams on a daily basis:
- Production and supply chain - centralized around our two main warehouses near Amsterdam and Birmingham the teams run our sourcing, supply chain, production and fulfilment operation. They cover the full range of products we process in our own warehouses: flowers, plants, gifts, food & drinks, packaging material and much more. They optimise for customer satisfaction, On Time-In Full fulfilment, quality and associated COGS.
- Fulfilment and Customer Operations - managing our partially outsourced sourcing, production and fulfilment in the UK, optimising our delivery organisation in all countries we are active in and servicing our customers with the Customer Delight team. The team works closely with our partners to achieve operational excellence and optimise for quality and customer satisfaction, delivery performance, capacity and associated COGS.
The procurement and inventory team is part of our Production and Supply chain domain, and is responsible for the inventory of all non-horti products used in all warehouses of our group. Among others this covers packaging materials (eg. flower boxes, wrapping paper, ribbons), lifestyle products (eg. vases, candles, baby clothing), food & drinks (chocolates, biscuits, alcoholic beverages). With our rapidly expanding range, the amount of categories and products is continuously growing.
The main responsibility of the procurement and inventory team is ensuring that we have the right materials, in the right place, with the right quality for the best price and in the most sustainable way possible.
This team is also responsible for optimizing our inventory position to balance maximising availability for customers and limiting our stock holding in line with stock cover goals and supply chain timelines.
⚙️ What you'll be doing:
The head of procurement and inventory manages the wider procurement and inventory team and holds responsibility for:
- Procurement strategy: Developing and executing our supplier, sourcing and inventory holding strategy, anticipating the growth of our business and external macro economical threads and opportunities on material availability and supply chain
- Supplier relations: Responsible for optimal supplier relations, supplier contracts and (re)negotiations by establishing and monitoring supplier SLA’s and KPI’s
- Risk & compliance Management: Conduct supplier risk assessments, manage third-party risk, compliance with regulations and internal policies in close collaboration with our legal team
- Forecasts: Translating business forecasts into material forecasts: ensuring sufficient material availability in all warehouses anticipating relevant supply chains and order deadlines, while keeping total stock value as low as possible and in storing a steady flow of orders into the warehouses. Keep BoM up to date in collaboration with the range team.
- Data Analysis and Reporting: Prepare regular reports to track cost savings, supplier performance, risk management outcomes, stock holding, turnover rates and stock ageing
- Quality control: Implement robust supplier quality controls in collaboration with internal QA and technical teams, ensuring the highest standards of product delivery
- Systems: Optimize usage of our WMS and ERP tool for all warehouses (both own and 3rd party) and ensure systems are up to date and accurate
- Supply chain: Manage and develop inbound supply chain processes (replenishment, PO’s, quality control, product recalls, etc.) per material category
- Supporting the category managers in executing the procurement and inventory strategy for all brands and all items, including key (re)negotiations and issue resolution
- Supporting stock managers in ensuring material availability and reliable supply chain and replenishment setup, including urgent issue resolutions
- Financials: Collaborate with finance team to ensure our stock balance, month end and stock consumption data is correctly processed and our P&L captures the right cost base for inventory used on on hand
- Footprint: Optimizing our material footprint: reduce the use of materials and lead in the transitioning to 100% sustainable material usage
- Team management: Managing the 4 FTE procurement and inventory team (2 stock managers and 2 category managers)
- Collaboration: Visit our warehouses frequently to optimize inventory management execution, the goods receiving process, to identify improvement potential and to improve collaboration.
✅ You…
- Hold a Masters degree in business, engineering or equivalent
- Have at least 5 years’ experience in a role with responsibility over procurement / purchasing / supply chain management / inventory management
- Have significant experience in an operational context that handles physical products for (in-house) D2C fulfilment and distribution
- Are an experienced people, supplier and stakeholder manager
- Are an excellent communicator with great negotiating skills
- Have attention to detail, great analytical skills and know how to handle data and large data sets
- Are entrepreneurial and self-starting
- Have a very results-oriented way of working and are a pragmatic thinker
- Are comfortable working cross functionally with (remote) teams across the business
- Are based either in the Amsterdam area (NL) or near Birmingham (UK).
✅ It would be great if you also have….
- Proven technical skills in excel/sheets
- Experience in packaging / e-commerce / lifestyle products
- Worked with ERPs and WMS
- Experience in running tenders / RFPsExperience in determining / creating strategy on procurement and inventory
- International working experience.
These are some of the skills and experience we think will enable success in this role, but please don’t worry if you are missing some of these. We’re committed to building a team made up of different strengths, skills and experiences, so if you’re excited about our values, passionate about what you do and would like to join us in doing things more thoughtfully, we’d love to hear from you.
🏡 Belonging at Bloom & Wild Group
We know that we learn through our differences, and building a diverse team has always been central to creating the best experience for our customers. We value all backgrounds, perspectives, ideas and experiences, and encourage everyone to share their opinions openly within our caring and inclusive team.
🧭 Our ways of working
We do things a little bit differently. From inventing letterbox flowers to founding The Thoughtful Marketing Movement. We’re big on collaboration, empathy, knowledge sharing and growth, and our values drive our priorities every day:
Lead change for good: we have the guts to try new things and step up to do what matters most
Think deeply, act swiftly: we make sure there’s thoughtful rationale behind our approach and always act swiftly to implement ideas
Care wildly: we pour care and creativity into everything we do and pay attention to the things that make a difference
Stay open, be curious: we’re open about what we’re doing and why, and we welcome challenges from each other
We really believe in the power of face-to-face connections - be that through a shared project, a learning and development opportunity, or an after work social - and trust our teams to make the right decisions (for them and us) about where and how they work each day. Our working patterns are flexible and vary across the business, depending on the type of work, need for collaboration, and personal and wellbeing circumstances.
🌟 (Some of) The good stuff
To care wildly for our customers, firstly we care wildly for our teams. We work hard to craft a culture of thoughtfulness and care, where there is a strong sense of inclusion and belonging, enabling all of our people to thrive and be successful each day.
🌻 Work that works for you
- Flexible working (core hours from 10-4pm)
- Work Abroad for up to 30 days each year
- Share in our success with a choice to take equity options from day 1
- 1 day per year to volunteer on a project that’s close to your heart
- We’ll support your commute to our office and site locations. Depending on your journey to work, this may include a Swapfiets, an NS business card or expense reimbursement
- Phone allowance
🌴 Time off
- 24 vacation days and an option to buy an extra 5 each year
- Happiness days (1 extra day each quarter for your personal ‘me time’)
- 1 celebration day per year, to celebrate a holiday that’s important to you
- Flexible bank holidays - trade a bank holiday for another day that fits your beliefs, values and celebration calendar
🌱 Health and wellbeing
- Mental health support through Open Up, including access to online therapy sessions
- Allies and champions groups
- Mental Health First Aiders and awareness training for our managers
- In person and virtual yoga every week
- Our office kitchen is stocked with healthy drinks and snacks to keep you going
- Workplace pension contributions
🌳 Growth & Development
- A flexible training framework for every stage of your career development through our Bloom & Learn programme
- Internal & external Speaker Sessions on a variety of different inspirational topics.
💐 Moments that matter
- We love having lunch together! We offer daily fresh and healthy lunch options at our locations in Amsterdam and Amstelveen,
- A BBQ-worthy rooftop terrace (Amsterdam HQ)
- Social & wellbeing monthly calendar
- We love to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and other important milestones!
- Summer and End of Year events, team lunches and post-peak celebrations
- Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!
🫱🫲 Getting hired
We know that job searching can be daunting, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that your experience with us is a good one. Interviewing is a 2-way process, and we’re keen to answer all of the questions you have, so that you can be sure (and excited!) that we’re the right move for you.
We believe in leading change for good, so do let us know if there’s anything we can do to support your application process. Also, if you have any feedback, please help us to improve our candidate experience by sharing (anonymously) here.