Innovative Allocation and Product Lifecycle Management Executive

Katie Devlin is an Allocation and Inventory Management expert with 20+ years in Executive leadership positions for multiple omni-channel specialty retailers. Katie has implemented Allocation systems as both a client and consultant, focused on building processes and tools that are easily adopted by organizations to deliver results. Katie consistently builds motivated collaborative teams ,across multiple functions to deliver results while enjoying the process. Katie’s early experience in consulting and further experience in systems implementations as a client led her to be a valued resource on projects both in and out of her scope of responsibility. She has helped create requirements and design process and team structure for projects focused on reporting, pricing, assortment and space planning as well as her core functions of inventory management, size buying and demand forecasting. Category experience includes apparel, accessories, footwear, and beauty.

Experience

  • Victoria’s Secret Beauty – Vice President Merchandise Planning & Allocation
    • Delivered record merchandise margin and topline growth rates for a ~$1B annualized, omnichannel beauty and accessories business. Key partner to lead merchant and member of Executive Committee. 
    • Developed long-range growth plans for beauty and accessories divisions, including new businesses. 
  • J.Crew – Vice President Allocation
    • Brought in to rebuild allocation function: created roles and responsibilities, made talent assessments and took appropriate actions, and built capabilities and cross-functional relationships. 
    • Supervised one of Blue Yonder’s fastest implementations to date—in 16 weeks—by selecting software and developing processes and functional and reporting requirements. 
  • The Children’s Place – Vice President Inventory Management
    • Led team of 15 in inventory management across ~1,000 stores, allocating ~220M units and ~$600M cost annually. Maximized gross margin and revenue via development of topline inventory strategy and bottoms-up style / color / store-level inventory plans to support topline sales plans. 
    • Supported successful implementation and adoption of JDA allocation implementation by developing processes and functional and reporting requirements. Added nearly $30M in annual revenue by recommending addition of size 16 to US retail channel. 

Specialization

  • Allocation and Inventory Management
  • Merchandise Planning
  • Assortment Planning
  • Space Planning
  • Lifecycle Pricing

Expertise

  • Executive Leadership
  • Process Re-engineering
  • Organizational Design
  • Business Requirements
  • System Selection
  • Retail Consultant

Companies

  • Victoria’s Secret Beauty
  • J.Crew
  • The Children’s Place
  • Limited Brands
  • Bath and Body Works
  • Accenture

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