Seasonal Sales & Experience Manager

The Role at a Glance 

The Sales & Experience Manager owns the entire guest-facing experience at the FAO Schwarz Flagship — every moment of wonder, meaningful interaction, and selling opportunity — and is accountable for ensuring that all of it performs at the highest level, both commercially and experientially, every day. 

This role is about building the people, standards, and culture that make the floor run brilliantly. Leading a team across Sales and Experience, the focus is on coaching associates, developing leaders, and owning the commercial performance in a complex, high-profile environment. You’re the one keeping a constant pulse on the store’s daily rhythm — staying close to the floor, anticipatingneeds before they become issues, and ensuring the team, the business, and the guest experience are all moving together seamlessly. 

Creating the Magic 

Lead the Floor 

• Set and own the standard for delivering the guest experience across the floor, ensuring every sales interaction, experience, and demonstration feels energetic, immersive, and unmistakably on brand, and that the magic never slips. 

• Complete structured observations across your team, coaching to raise the bar on quality, guest connection, and commercial performance. 

• Set the readiness standard across the floor: props, costumes, product, and technology are always guest-ready before the first guest arrives. 

• Lead the on-the-ground execution of new experience launches, activations, and events, ensuring every moment lives up to the standard intended. 

• Champion FAO Schwarz and partner brand standards across every area of the floor, and surface feedback and improvement suggestions to senior leadership. 

Lead the Team 

• Hold yourself accountable for the quality of leadership your Leads deliver, not just for their individual performance; your job is to help make them better managers. 

• Develop your Leads into people leaders in their own right, invest in their coaching skills, their floor presence, and their ability to hold their own teams to a high standard with confidence and consistency. 

• Own the hiring bar and onboarding standards for your teams, ensuring the right people come through the door and are set up to contribute quickly. 

• Set clear expectations, course-correct quickly, and recognize great work; when performance falls short, address it directly and partner with store leadership and HR as needed. 

• Hold regular calibration conversations across the Lead team to ensure performance is assessed fairly, development needs are identified early, and no one is left without a clear picture of where they stand and where they are headed. 

Run the Operation 

• Own operational readiness across the floor, setting routines and standards that ensure experiences are covered, demonstrations are live, and the floor is always set before the first guest arrives. 

• Take ultimate responsibility for opening and closing the store, ensuring the floor is operationally set each day and properly secured each night, with every Lead clearly understanding their role in making it happen. 

• Partner on scheduling and zoning outputs to ensure floor coverage aligns with trading patterns and staffing agreements, and that the business is appropriately resourced across all shifts. 

• Maintain oversight of stock levels, props, costumes, and experience technology, identifying gaps before they reach the guest and ensuring Leads resolve or escalate issues promptly. 

• Uphold register compliance, cash-handling, and loss-prevention standards across the floor, ensuring every Lead holds their team accountable for consistent execution and escalates concerns without delay. 
   

Drive Business Performance 

• Own the commercial performance of the floor, holding the Lead team accountable for sales goals and KPIs, analyzing what is driving or constraining results, and acting decisively in response. 

• Build a floor culture where a strong guest experience and strong commercial results go hand in hand, and coach Leads to develop that mindset in their own teams. 

• Use performance data, floor observations, and sales trends to identify opportunities, adjust tactics, and sharpen the team's focus on the behaviors that drive engagement into sales. 

• Bring a commercial point of view to how experiences are run and evolved, using guest behavior, sales trends, and floor insights to inform recommendations for senior leadership. 

Partner Across the Business 

• Build strong peer-level partnerships across Operations, Visual, and Store Leadership teams to ensure the full store operates as a cohesive team with shared standards and no gaps. 

• Serve as the senior floor voice in cross-functional conversations, representing the experience and commercial reality of the guest-facing floor in decisions that affect it. 

• Work closely with third-party vendors and brand partners, serving as a key day-to-day contact on the floor and ensuring their departments are operationally sound, commercially effective, and in line with brand standards. 

• Connect your Lead tier with senior leadership, ensuring that priorities and business updates flow clearly in both directions, risks and performance trends are surfaced early, and nothing reaches the floor as a surprise. 

What Success looks like 

• The floor delivers a consistently magical and commercially sharp guest experience; every department runs smoothly, every theatrical moment lands, and every associate knows their role in making it happen. 

• Sales targets are met, KPIs are understood and driven by the team, and you can speak authoritatively about what is performing, what is not, and what you are doing about it. 

• Your Leads are growing as people leaders, holding their teams accountable, developing their associates, and building the habits that sustain great leadership. 

• New hires coming through the door are the right people, well onboarded and contributing quickly. 

• Vendor and brand partner relationships are productive, professionally managed, and consistently reflect positively on the business. 

• Store leadership views you as a credible, commercially minded partner who understands the full floor and brings solutions, not just problems. 

• The floor runs with confidence in your absence. Your Leads and their teams are set up to succeed without you in the room. 

This role aligns with Level M4 in our Career Framework, reflecting ownership of a complex, multi-functional team, commercial accountability across the entire guest-facing floor, and the people leadership capability to develop Leads into leaders in their own right. It provides a strong foundation for progression to Senior Manager roles (Level M5). 

Requirements

You don't need to have done this exact role before, but you do need to be the kind of leader who raises the standard of everythingand everyone around them. 

• 3+ years of management experience in retail, hospitality, or a premium experiential environment, with a track record of building high-performing teams and developing people leaders. 

• Strong commercial acumen and confidence reading performance data, making business decisions, and holding a team accountable to results. 

• A deep understanding of experiential retail, knowing what makes a guest experience feel extraordinary, how to protect it at scale, and how to evolve it over time. 

• Strong cross-functional communication skills and the confidence to represent the floor's point of view in senior conversations. 

• Comfortable engaging with third-party vendor and brand partners as a day-to-day floor contact, with professionalism and commercial awareness. 

• A genuine love of play, toys, and what the FAO Schwarz brand stands for, and the ability to inspire that in everyone around you. 

• Flexibility to work days, evenings, weekends, and peak retail periods. Ability to stand for extended periods and lift up to 25 pounds.

Experience in experiential, flagship, or multi-experience retail environments is a strong plus. A love of play is non-negotiable. 

Benefits

• $33.65/hr + Store Incentive Bonus

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental & Vision coverage
• Employee discounts
• Pre-Tax Commuter Benefits
• Retirement Plan (401k + Match)
• Paid Vacation + paid company holidays
• Paid + Unpaid sick time

This job description should not be construed to contain every function/responsibility that may be required to be performed by this role. Employees are required to perform other related functions as assigned.

FAO Schwarz is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, age, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, military or veteran status, arrest or conviction record, predisposing genetic characteristics, status as a victim of domestic violence, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.