Welcome to Behind the Thinking - the series where we introduce the people behind Commerce Thinking and explore where they began and what brought them to this point.
This time, we’re featuring Amy Washington: part merch brain, part systems expert. Whilst she describes her rise from Merch Admin to Head of Planning as pretty traditional, her move from accounting to retail merch was anything but that. And it was this switch that pushed her to become the person who can read the trade and fix the systems.
“I could do accountancy - but for fashion”
Amy didn’t start out in pursuit of a buying & merchandising career. She studied Accounting and Finance at university, loved the numbers, and found herself helping friends on fashion courses with the maths behind merchandising. That was the spark: the realisation that she could do accountancy but for fashion.
After graduating, Amy stepped into a store-based role at Louis Vuitton, Birmingham - a stop-gap that then saw her move to London and into the industry she really wanted. Her first commercial role was as a distributor at Debenhams (Beauty). Beauty was the perfect early sandbox: non‑seasonal, continuity‑led, and highly replenishment‑driven - great training for stock logic and cadence.
Next, Amy moved on to her first fashion gig at AllSaints. She joined the womenswear team as a Merchandise Admin Assistant, managing the pure mechanics of merchandising: sizing, allocations, all the heavy‑lifting Excel admin responsible for moving stock to stores. She progressed through to Assistant Merchandiser, and later worked across AllSaints menswear.
From there, Amy held roles at a number of highly respected brands, including: Merchandiser at Reiss, and then at Joseph, before stepping to a Planner role at Burberry.
Head of Planning at Acne Studios
In 2019, Amy joined Acne Studios as Head of Planning at a moment when the business had no real planning function in place. Over the next five years, she built the foundations: establishing a proper OTB process, introducing budgeting by region and category, and creating the tools that allowed planning to be part of everyday commercial decision-making.
Before she arrived, the process was messy - CEO growth ambitions were emailed around as topline percentage targets that bore little relation to the three-year finance plan or what stores were actually budgeted to deliver. The result was predictable: excess stock, missed sell-through targets, and constant disconnects between buying expectations and sales realities. Amy fixed that by aligning finance targets with sales plans, using long-range planning to guide buys even before budgets were finalised, and breaking everything down by market so the brand knew exactly what needed to ship to China versus the US, instead of fire-fighting from Stockholm.
She also drove a major shift in allocations. Previously, senior buyers manually distributed stock for each season on sprawling Excel sheets - hundreds of SKUs across dozens of stores, assigned by gut feel and weeks of admin. Replenishment was equally manual, based on limited exports and guesswork. Amy led the implementation of a proper allocation tool, removing bottlenecks, cutting weeks of wasted effort, and replacing intuition with data-driven decisions.
Alongside this, she untangled flawed VAT and currency conversion practices that were inflating buy numbers, creating misaligned budgets, and fuelling overstock. Correcting those processes was a turning point: for the first time, sales values, budgets, and buys matched up.
Numbers, systems, and making complexity visual
If there’s a theme to Amy’s career, it’s an interest for turning analysis into action - and making it easy for other teams to act. She places importance on:
Visual data vs static spreadsheets. Sharing SKU lists with marketing departments doesn’t unlock a creative response. Translate trade into visuals that creative teams can actually respond to.
The right “hero”. Marketing’s runway piece isn’t always the commercial hero. Get marketing on board as early as possible, show them the units that drive the P&L so they can build a plan around that.
Delivery truth. Make delivery status simple and shared. Replace static, mixed wholesale/retail Excel lists with a single, readable view. Then have merch/buying consolidate and communicate issues with marketing & VM while campaigns are still adjustable.
Being happily sold‑out. Some campaign pieces are meant to create desire, not carry volume. Brands can push a product and be happy to sell out; that’s okay when framed correctly.
What Amy brings that’s different
Amy has worked the entire merchandising cycle: from budgets through to range architecture, pricing and size curves into allocation, trading, markdown and exit. So, she knows where the lifecycle bends (and where it breaks). She’s equally fluent in systems: from SAP to custom BI, she bridges merch and IT, asking the simple questions, building the reports people actually use, and fixing the friction that slows decisions down.
When things get messy - seasons overlap, lead times shift, wholesale and DTC run on different clocks - she remains steady, bringing teams with her. Above all else, Amy’s grounded in operator reality - she’s done the replens, sat with the systems teams, and understands the difference between a data model and shop‑floor reality.
Amy’s Advice for Emerging Merch Talent
Get great at spreadsheets. Excel is embedded in so many Merch roles. You really need to understand how it works.
Be curious and innovate. Build the sheet, fix the report, ask why the tool no one uses is better.
Embrace the unpredictable. Designs get changed, products are changed, lead times change. Be prepared to keep pace and thrive in this intense environment.
Read the spec, not the title. Different companies have their own terminology. In some organisations, “Planner” means “Merchandiser”. Roles vary brand‑to‑brand.