Susie Lakin

Why this persona fits the audience

Manages a two-person merchandising group for a US e-commerce retailer. She keeps local copies of supplier catalogs, brand pages, and public product pages so she can compare descriptions, imagery, and category structures during assortment planning. Most of the process is done in spreadsheets and folder archives.

• Age: 46
• Location: Chicago, Illinois, US
• Occupation: Merchandising manager
• Income: $84k
• Education: Bachelor's degree in business administration
• Company size: Mid-sized retailer (200-500 employees)
• Years in role: 7

“If I can't see the data offline, I don't know if it's real until it's already too late.”

Susie Lakin is a 46-year-old Merchandising Manager based in the Chicago suburbs, navigating the complexities of modern e-commerce with a blend of traditional rigor and digital pragmatism. Holding a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration earned over two decades ago, she has spent nearly her entire career climbing the ladder from junior buyer to her current leadership role. Unlike many of her peers who have rushed to adopt cloud-native, AI-driven suites, Susie operates with a distinct philosophy: trust nothing that isn't locally verified. Her workflow is a hybrid of legacy methods and modern necessity, characterized by a sprawling ecosystem of local folders and meticulously maintained spreadsheets. Currently, she manages a tight-knit team of two, responsible for the integrity of the company's online assortment. Her daily reality involves a relentless cycle of downloading supplier catalogs, capturing screenshots of competitor brand pages, and manually reconciling these against internal inventory lists. She keeps local copies of everything—HTML snapshots, image assets, and PDF specs—to ensure that if the internet goes down or a supplier changes their site structure, her data remains intact. This habit stems from a past incident where a supplier update caused a cascade of pricing errors that cost the company thousands, a lesson that cemented her belief in redundancy and offline verification. Financially, Susie is secure but not wealthy, earning $84,000 annually. She views her income as a tool for stability, directing excess funds toward her children's education and a modest retirement portfolio. She is deeply conscious of budget efficiency, both in her personal life and her professional tool selection; she will not justify spending on a $5,000 annual license if a free, open-source alternative can achieve the same result with a bit of manual effort. Her personality, marked by high conscientiousness and moderate openness, drives her to create systems that are robust and repeatable. While she is open to learning new technologies, she is not a pioneer; she waits to see how a tool performs under pressure before adopting it. Recently, she made the decision to automate the naming convention of her downloaded files, a small change that saved her ten minutes a day but represented a significant shift in her otherwise manual workflow. Susie is a woman who believes that the best way to manage chaos is to impose a strict, logical order upon it, one spreadsheet cell at a time.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

Susie wakes up at 6:00 AM, not to an alarm, but to the rhythm of her household. After a quick coffee and checking emails, she drops her kids at school, spending the drive listening to a podcast about retail trends. By 9:00 AM, she is at her desk, immediately diving into the morning's most critical task: updating the local archive of a major supplier's new spring collection. This involves downloading twenty new PDFs, renaming them systematically, and importing key metadata into her master tracking spreadsheet. At 11:00 AM, she holds a brief stand-up with her team to resolve a discrepancy in category mapping for a clothing vendor. Lunch is a solitary affair at her desk while she compares competitor pricing on a specific product line. The afternoon is spent in deep work, manually archiving competitor website changes and ensuring all image links in her internal database are functional. She leaves at 5:30 PM sharp to pick up her children, ending her day with a commute home where she mentally plans the weekend grocery list and meal prep.

Lifestyle

Susie lives in a well-maintained colonial in Evanston, just north of Chicago, where she shares the space with her husband, Mark, an accountant, and their two high school-aged children. Her home reflects her professional obsession with order; bookshelves are color-coded, and every drawer has a labeled divider. Weekends are reserved for family activities—hiking in the Lake Michigan area or attending soccer games—but she fiercely guards her Saturday mornings for household management and personal research into organizational tools. Financially, she is conservative, prioritizing retirement contributions and paying off student loans early rather than accumulating luxury goods. Socially, she maintains a close-knit circle of three or four friends from her college days, preferring deep, low-stakes conversations over large networking events.

Work life

At her mid-sized e-commerce retailer, Susie leads a lean team of two, acting as the primary gatekeeper for product data integrity. Her day is dominated by the friction of manual data aggregation: downloading PDF catalogs from suppliers, scraping images from brand sites, and cross-referencing SKUs across hundreds of internal spreadsheets. She spends hours maintaining local archives of competitor pricing and layout changes, often using browser extensions to save snapshots. The pressure comes from the sheer volume of SKU updates required weekly and the need to catch discrepancies before they hit the live site. Her coworkers rely on her to interpret raw data into actionable buying strategies, though the lack of automated tools means she often works late to reconcile mismatched file formats.

Relationships

Susie's primary support system is her husband, who handles the financial planning side of their life, allowing her to focus on operational logic at work. Her relationship with her children is active but busy; she values their independence as they navigate high school. Professionally, she relies heavily on her two direct reports, whom she treats more like partners than subordinates due to the small team size. She has a mentorship bond with a former boss now at a larger firm, providing occasional career guidance. In her community, she is known as the 'go-to' person for organizing neighborhood garage sales or school fund drives, leveraging her natural talent for logistics.

How they decide

Susie employs a cautious, evidence-based decision-making style. She rarely acts on impulse or hearsay; instead, she gathers all available data points, creates a comparative matrix, and tests small scenarios before committing. She is skeptical of flashy interfaces if the backend logic isn't sound. Peer recommendations carry weight only if they come from trusted colleagues with similar technical constraints. She prefers solutions that offer long-term stability and clear documentation over those promising quick fixes or aggressive marketing claims.

How they sound

Her speech is articulate, efficient, and devoid of unnecessary filler words. She tends to speak in complete, structured sentences, often using industry-specific terminology like 'SKU proliferation,' 'category parity,' and 'version control.' She avoids hyperbole, preferring precise adjectives like 'inconsistent' or 'inefficient' over emotional descriptors. When explaining a problem, she naturally breaks it down into steps. She does not use slang and maintains a professional tone even in casual settings, though she softens her delivery with colleagues to show approachability.