Title: Commercial Planning & Promotions Manager

Location: Sacramento, CA preferred; open to candidates based elsewhere in California

Reports to: Chief Brand and Marketing Officer

Department: Marketing

Key Partners: Product, Retail, Finance

Compensation range: $90,000.00 - $125,000.00 per year DOE

Status: Exempt

ABOUT THE ROLE 

The Commercial Planning & Promotions Manager is the operational backbone of embarc's commercial engine. This role owns the annual, quarterly, and monthly promotional calendar across all stores. It aligns promotions, seasonal campaigns, product launches, and store activations with sales priorities, from planning and discount builds to QA, store communications, and digital deployment, in close partnership with our brands.

Working at the center of multiple teams, this seat keeps the calendar balanced, holds every team to its commitments, and makes sure stores have what they need to deliver a seamless customer experience. Then they close the loop. They report on how each promotion performed and use what they learn to shape what we run next.

This is a hands-on role, equal parts strategy and execution. You'll help decide what we run and why, then make it happen: brief creative, deploy assets, check discount builds, and update the site yourself when needed.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

The Calendar

• Own one master plan covering fleetwide campaigns and location-specific variations
• Lock all promotion details before any build or creative work begins
• Spot gaps, overloads, and conflicts across categories, brands, and stores
• Run the weekly Commercial Planning meeting: set the agenda, surface risks and decisions, and own the follow-ups

Promotional Strategy

• Define offers, timing, objectives, and investment with Product, Marketing, Retail, and Finance
• Design promotions with clear jobs, like driving traffic, growing basket size, or bringing back lapsed customers, and match each offer to its goal
• Partner with the Brand Partnerships & Assortment Manager to shape the promo mix with brands
• Partner with the Product team to weigh discount depth against margin and customer value
• Brief the CRM team on every promotion, so the right offer reaches the right customers on time

Execution & Process

• Own every promotion from planning through post-mortem, including the pieces other teams deliver
• Brief the designer on every promotion, collect final assets, and deploy them to stores, the website, and in-store screens
• Brief discount programming and verify every build in POS and online before launch
• Update the website with banners, landing pages, and promo details for every campaign
• Reconcile inventory, pricing, marketing, and ops inputs before launch
• Make the go/no-go call. Nothing goes live until QA is complete.
• Partner with Retail Ops to confirm every store is launch-ready: assets live, promoted product stocked and visible
• Own the weekly store communication standard
• Manage discount use and spend against plan across all stores
• Build repeatable promotional playbooks for new store openings, new markets, competitive responses, and seasonal moments

Performance & Insight

• Report on what promotions did: sales, margin, traffic, AOV, new vs. returning customers, store-level execution
• Deliver promo performance recaps to brands
• Design simple store-specific tests and read the results honestly
• Turn results into recommendations for the next cycle, and flag what isn't working

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• The calendar is full, balanced, and locked weeks out
• Every promotion gets a post-mortem, and the next calendar reflects what we learned
• Every promotion launches correctly, with zero preventable errors
• Product, Marketing, and Retail work from one plan, and handoffs happen without escalation
• No team is blocked by missing information, and stores get answers fast
• Promotions measurably drive traffic and grow basket size without eroding margin
• Playbooks exist for new store openings, new markets, competitive pressure, and seasonal moments, so we respond from a plan instead of from scratch
• No chasing. Leadership hears about problems from this role first, with a fix attached.

QUALIFICATIONS

Required

• 4+ years in multi-location retail promotions, commercial planning, or merchandising operations
• A track record of owning a promotional calendar
• A working knowledge of promo economics: discount depth, margin impact, acquisition vs. retention
• Fluent in Excel, dashboards, and AI tools. You automate the busywork and go from data to decision to action.
• Strong communication and writing skills
• Experience leading people, whether direct reports, contractors, or cross-functional teams
• You've built or fixed a process that other teams adopted, not just followed one
• Hands-on with retail and e-commerce tools. You can build, publish, and fix things yourself, not just assign them.

Preferred

• Cannabis, grocery, convenience, or specialty retail experience
• Experience with brand co-funded promotions and chargebacks

TOOLS & PLATFORMS

• Treez: POS and discount management
• Budflow: website/app banner scheduling and product content
• Seed: in-store TV content management
• Zipline: retail team communications
• Asana: task assignment and cross-functional project tracking
• Microsoft Teams: internal and partner communication
• Figma: creative asset review and QA (not design)