Fashion

Lifestyle

Music

Outdoor

Skate

Snow

Streetwear

Yoga

Camping

Gardening

Photography

Environment

Traveling

Outdoors

Crafting

Healthy eating

Thrifting/picking

Jewelry designer/maker

Beach combing for sea glass

E-Commerce Manager

Over 12 years of Outdoor Industry experience with 7 years buying/merchandising experience in a multi-channel retail environment.  Knowledgeable in multiple areas of the Outdoor/Action Sports retail industry with the ability to independently learn and develop new skills quickly and efficiently.  Strong trend analysis and foresight due to personal enthusiasm for gear and lifestyle.  

Looking to expand my knowledge to the manufacturing/vendor side of the Outdoor/Action Sports industry.

Seabrook Avenue was started back in 2012 by me and my girlfriend from a single strand of beads.  We started making jewelry just before moving from Seattle to Brooklyn, NY (now do you see where the name came from?) as an outlet for our creativity and we quickly learned we could make money from our creations.  

We specialize in handcrafted jewelry with a focus on rough cut gemstones and beading.  We make everything from home while we enjoy the company of our two cats, Bigglesworth & Frankenlarry.  We also have an eye for vintage goods and other fine knick-knacks, clothing, and more.  

Our objective is to create quality, affordable, and fun jewelry that can be enjoyed by everybody!  We personally source our stones, beads, and other materials used in all of our hand-crafted products from local suppliers and artists.  We'll also make something custom for you.  If we aren't featuring a stone or mineral you really want just let us know and we'll work with you to make it.  

We both love going on adventures and tend to pick up items from local thrift stores, so don't be alarmed if you visit our tent at one of the local Seattle area markets and find us selling vintage coffee mugs, clothing, and more.  One man's trash can be everybody else's treasure!

Co-Founder/Owner

I came to Caffe Vita looking for some change in my career path.  I have worked in a food environment before, but never as specialized as coffee.  My love and passion for small companies doing BIG things attracted me to Caffe Vita, not to mention my love for coffee.  

My role as Merchandise Planner has allowed me to grow and develop my skills in both of the retail and wholesale environment.  My role required that I be involved in multiple areas of the company including production, customer service, retail management, warehousing, accounting, and sales.  You will find a summarized list of my daily responsibilities for both retail and wholesale operations.  

-Building internal communication practices for better business practices.  
-Coordinating training schedules for customers service and sales for new programs and products. 
-Harvesting vendor relationships in order to ensure priority, meaningful discounts and better shipping, better payment terms, and low order minimums.  
-Establishing a proper end-of-month physical inventory procedure for reporting purposes. 
-Data entry and maintenance in Quickbooks. 
-Creating the Merchandise Strategy Calendar.  
-Coordinating merchandise needs with warehouse, marketing, customer service, and retail management.
-Built and organized purchasing programs for new/used coffee equipment (wholesale)
-Processed purchase orders for new coffee equipment and scheduled delivery times based on installation schedules
-Monitored inventory levels on products such as cups, lids, food, beverage, and other items sold on a daily basis and adjusted par levels based on seasonality and general movement of products.  Processed daily purchase orders to ensure the warehouse was consistently in-stock with needed products. 
-Evaluated product selections to ensure proper assortment based on sales, demand, and company core values. 
-Sourced new vendors and products for both wholesale and retail sales environment.

Merchandise Planner

Caffe Vita is one of the longest existing independent coffee roasting companies with over 20 years experience in the coffee industry.  Based in the heart of the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Vita operates 11 cafe locations over 4 markets; Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York City.  

Caffe Vita strives to cultivate long lasting and meaningful partnerships with coffee farms around the world and only uses fair and direct trade practices.  Their roasting and production are all USDA organic certified.  

Although Caffe Vita has a large footprint in the coffee world, this independent company still acts small, giving my multiple roles and responsibilities.  

E-Commerce Manager (March 2015 - present)
Caffe Vita is currently in the process of launching a new website.  My role as E-Comm Manager is to refine and test the customer facing experience using WordPress and WooCommerce.  My responsibilities inlclude; 
-Building category pages. 
-Building product pages and assigning products to categories.
-Writing copy including page summaries, product short/long descriptions tooptimize organic SEO
-Product tags 
-Pricing
-Coordinating product and lifestyle photography for use on website and social media.
-Setting images in site. 
-Testing environment and communicating needs to the development team through Jira.

My experience with Zulily really took my e-commerce buying experience to the next level.  In my past roles it was all about the numbers.  I would look at spreadsheets and numbers to drive most of my buying decisions.  Zulily gave me the opportunity to look outside of the box.  I have always sort of pushed the limits with a few decisions, but having the ability to source products without the burdens of owning inventory really takes things to the next level.  

Don't get me wrong though.  Spreadsheets and business analysis still played a major role in decisions, I just had a few less restrictions than most other retail environments.  

-Build and nurture business relationships with hundreds of vendors within a specific category.
-Source new vendors and products for daily sales and promotions. 
-Source new products and categories from existing vendor base. 
-Negotiate product, inventory, pricing, and terms for potential business on Zuliliy
-Generate results and share performance with vendors as follow up to 72 hour promotional event. 
-Forecast future events with vendors and schedule events based on frequency, performance, and product availability.
-Manage team of associate buyers and merchandisers to build out events based on vendor communication and assets.
-Generate hindsight reports on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
-Present results and findings to group of buyers within the company.

Buyer/Merchandiser

Moving to New York City and taking this role with CCS was definitely a stretch in my career path.  I really went out on a limb on this one.  Even though things didn't end up working out I look back on this experience as great.  It really taught me a lot about myself, and how to build great and lasting relationships with your vendors.  

If you grew up in the 90's and skateboarded you are pretty familiar with CCS.  Remember that small catalog that used to come in the mail?  Yup, this is the same CCS, but it was owned by Footlocker, Inc. during the time I was there.  Footlocker wanted to get in to the quickly growing skate footwear category and purchased CCS from Delia's back in 2008.  I came in at the tail end of a 5 year experiment and unfortunately fell wrath to FL closing all 22 store locations.

-Analyzed daily sales, market competition, and inventory levels and made adjustments to business based on category performance and evaluation. 
-Participated in weekly management meetings discussing category performance, upcoming promotions, marketing strategies, etc. 
-Built and maintained business relationships with multiple vendors.
-Manage a team of buyers who purchased footwear product (pre-order/in-season) from vendors based on seasonal selection, vendor performance, current inventory assets and Open-to-Buy. 
-Built special or SMU products with vendors to fill gaps in seasonal selection or drive customer traffic in a competitive market.
-Generated quarterly and annual category hindsight reports and presented findings to Footlocker management including Ken Hicks.

Category Manager - Footwear

Zumiez will always have a huge place in my heart.  I actually started with Zumiez as a sales associate back in 2000.  I quickly worked my ways up the ranks and moved from a small town in Northern Utah to the big city lights of Salt Lake City, where I would quickly become store manager for this blossoming mall retailer.  Back then Zumiez had less than 100 store locations and I was part of building what is now one of the largest teen retail companies in the United States.  

When I moved to Seattle at the end of 2010 I didn't see the sun for 4 months, the longest Seattle had gone ever!  No really, 40-something days of no sunlight but I got through it and quickly went from being the first dedicated e-commerce buyer for the company to running over $50m in footwear business.  I've worked with brands like Nike, Vans, Supra, Converse, DC Shoes, and more.  I built and managed a multi-million dollar growth with TOMS.  My experience from Backcountry.com and previous experience with Zumiez back in the early days made me a valuable asset to the company.  I understood the core values of the company and respect Zumiez from never straying.  

-First dedicated E-Commerce Buyer for company.
-Built and established reporting practices still used by company.
-Tested new reporting environments specific to separating the different channels of business used by Zumiez.
-Worked with E-Commerce dev. team to build merchandising tools used on website.
-Managed relationships with multiple vendors specific to e-commerce needs and results.  
-Quickly adjusted to new role as footwear buyer for brick & mortar (over 500 store locations)
-Help transition new buyer into previous role of e-commerce buyer
-Managed product, sales, and vendor relationships for brick & mortar assortment.
-Utilized Buyer's Toolbox to analyze sales and inventory in order to make buying decisions.
-Generated monthly, quarterly, and annual hindsight reports and presented results to executive staff.

Footwear Buyer

This is where I will start my profile.  This is really the beginning of my professional career.  Prior to working as a retail buyer I was a retail manager for Zumiez, helped reinvent an independent record shop, was a private contractor for FedEx Home Delivery, and helped manage a restaurant/bakery.  That's right.  I'm a jack of all trades.  I've even done sales, 12 years to be exact.  I was an assistant sales rep for a major ski outerwear company based out of Aspen, CO.  

Backcountry.com was an amazing place to get my feet wet.  I had been working in the ski/snowboard industry as a sales rep and they were one of my accounts.  I jumped on the opportunity to become a buyer and they hired me.  My time had finally come!  Backcountry was operating something like 12 websites at the time and my focus was going to be skate and casual footwear for Dogfunk.com.  Well DF doesn't exist anymore but at the time it was the leading snowboard retail website in the world and BC was REI's biggest competitor.  We worked hard and played harder.  Everybody that worked at Backcountry.com was an enthusiast in some aspect of outdoor sports and we loved what we did.  

I can give you a glimpse of what I did as an assistant buyer, but I'm sure you already have a good idea of what those were.  Just reference my previous experiences and just know that I learned all of that starting here.  I worked for a great manager that went on to become PLM for Salomon Footwear, and I moved on to bigger things.

Assistant Footwear Buyer ASR

Find out detailed information about Thomas Warren, E-Commerce Manager in Seattle, WA

Thomas Warren: E-Commerce Manager in Seattle, WA

Thomas Warren

Seabrook Avenue

Caffe Vita Coffee Roasting Co.

Caffe Vita Coffee Roasting Co.

zulily

CCS/Footlocker, Inc.

Zumiez

Backcountry.com

Logan High School

Utah State University