Buyer Cover Letter Example

I own the full kitchen and dining category at Wynfield Home Goods, roughly $11 million a year across 45 vendors, from initial line review through markdown. The Buyer role at [Retailer name] is the kind of bigger, faster-turning assortment I've been building toward, and I want to run it with the same margin discipline I use now.

Two seasons ago I cut slow-moving SKUs from 340 to 210 in the category and reallocated that open-to-buy into three new cookware lines, which grew category sales 17% year over year while holding gross margin flat at 42%. I also renegotiated payment terms with our top vendor from net-30 to net-60, freeing roughly $400,000 in working capital without touching a single price point.

I run assortment planning and markdown modeling in Excel and our retail ERP, negotiate cost, terms and co-op directly with vendor principals, and I read weekly sell-through against plan before I read email. I've built strong enough vendor relationships that two of them call me before a price increase goes out to the rest of the market.

I'd welcome the chance to talk through the SKU rationalization project and how I'd apply that thinking to [Retailer name]'s assortment. I'm available for an interview at your convenience.