About Us
Ampersand Brands is a growing portfolio of beloved confectionery brands, including Hammond's Candies, the iconic hand-crafted candy maker, and Lolli & Pops, a premium retail and gifting brand with a national presence. The company is backed by strong growth ambitions, combining innovation, brand storytelling, and operational excellence to expand its reach and solidify its position as a leading player in the U.S. confections industry.
Role Summary
The Vice President, Retail for Ampersand Brands will lead all retail operations and in-store strategy, driving profitable growth across existing and future store footprints for Lolli & Pops and Hammond's Candies retail business. They will be accountable for creating a seamless, elevated, customer-centric experience in every physical touchpoint, aligning merchandising, store operations, visual presentation, and local marketing with the brand's premium identity. They will work in close partnership with executive leadership to scale the business while maintaining brand consistency, operational discipline, and excellence in execution.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic & Visionary Leadership
- Define the long-term retail vision and roadmap (new stores, formats, market entry, store concepts) aligned with the brand's mission and growth targets.
- Own the retail P&L, budgeting, forecasting, and performance metrics.
- Translate corporate strategy into retail KPIs, goals, and incentives.
- Lead annual planning, investment in store expansion/refurbishment, capital allocation for stores.
Store Network Growth & Optimization
- Oversee site selection, lease negotiations, store openings, and rollouts.
- Develop protocols for store remodels, relocations, store closure decisions, and lifecycle management of stores.
- Monitor and optimize the performance of existing stores: same-store sales growth, productivity, cost controls, store-level profitability.
- Evaluate potential new store formats (e.g. kiosks, pop-ups, express, experiential flagship) and pilot new approaches.
Operations & Execution Excellence
- Drive standardized operational processes across stores (opening/closing, inventory management, scheduling, loss prevention, staffing).
- Oversee retail operations leadership (District/Area Managers, store managers) and build capability in people, training, coaching, accountability.
- Ensure high levels of store readiness, maintenance, visual merchandising, store presentation, fixtures, brand standards.
- Lead the integration of point-of-sale, store systems, workforce management, omnichannel operations (e.g. buy-online-pickup-in-store, returns).
Customer Experience & Brand Consistency
- Ensure that the in-store brand experience (store aesthetics, product presentation, customer service, visual merchandising) aligns with the premium brand identity.
- Collaborate with marketing and brand to localize campaigns, in-store activations, events, promotions, and seasonal rollouts.
- Gather and leverage customer feedback, store-level insights, mystery shopping, and data to continuously enhance the in-store experience.
Cross-Function Collaboration
·Partner with merchandising / product teams to align assortments, private-label product launches, in-store exclusives, and promotions according to store strategy.
- Ensure effective inventory flow into stores, replenishment strategies, allocation, markdowns, and performance analytics.
- Work closely with e-commerce, digital, supply chain, product, marketing, finance and real estate teams to ensure omnichannel synergy, unified brand expression, and optimal inventory flow.
- Play a key role in acquisition integration (e.g. integration of Hammond's retail/wholesale retail channels, product lines) and scaling synergies.
Talent & Culture
- Build and lead a high-performing retail operations organization (store management, regional leadership).
- Develop training programs, leadership pipelines, performance evaluations, incentives, and retention strategies.
- Foster a culture of accountability, operational rigor, customer empathy, and brand-driven behaviors.
Data, Analytics & Insights
- Use store-level metrics, dashboards, KPIs (traffic, conversion, transactions, AOV, margin, shrinkage, labor productivity) to drive decisions.
- Implement strong forecasting, reporting, store benchmarking, and continuous improvement processes.
- Work with technology and analytics teams to deploy tools (store dashboards, analytics, forecasting, labor optimization).
Qualifications & Experience
- 12+ years of progressive retail leadership experience, with at least 5+ years at senior executive level (SVP/VP) in a multistore retail environment (ideally specialty retail, premium/gift-oriented, experiential retail).
- Proven track record growing and operating a retail store network (opening, scaling, optimizing).
- Strong P&L ownership experience, financial acumen, budgeting/forecasting.
- Deep operational expertise store execution, visual merchandising, process discipline, systems.
- Strong strategic mindset: able to envision future retail models and guide transformational change.
- Excellent leadership, team building, and talent development skills.
- Analytical and data-driven decision making, comfortable with KPIs, dashboards, and technology.
- Customer-obsessed mindset, with a feel for luxury/premium consumer expectations.
- Excellent communication skills, ability to partner with peers at C-level and cross-functional teams.
- Experience managing multiple geographies / regions and remote leadership.
- Experience with omnichannel / integrated retail-ecommerce models is a plus.
- Experience in the CPG / confectionery / gifting / specialty food sector.
Traits & Leadership Profile
The ideal candidate:
- Is both a visionary and a hands-on executor.
- Has a bias for innovation and continuous improvement in retail formats and consumer experience.
- Embraces a culture of brand consistency, premium experience, and operational excellence.
- Proactively seeks feedback from stores, frontline employees, and customers.
- Is comfortable with ambiguity, scaling change, and managing transformation.
- Leads with humility, empathy, and accountability.
- Has strong cross-functional orientation and willingness to be deeply collaborative.
Why You'll Love Working Here
- The chance to lead not one, but two iconic brands with very different but equally lovable personalities.
- A small, scrappy team that punches above its weight.
- A culture rooted in thoughtfulness, creativity, and joy.
The pay range for this role is:150,000 - 200,000 USD per year(Corporate)
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