Design Director

About this Role

We're looking for a Design Director to lead design excellence across Valerie's Centre of Excellence. You'll own the visual identity and design systems for every brand in our portfolio, ensuring each one has a distinctive, high-quality look and a design system capable of producing exceptional work at speed and scale. You'll lead, develop, and mentor Valerie's design team across brand, still, motion, digital, and e-commerce design.

You'll connect brand strategy, GTM direction, Growth Masters, and Creative Experiments into visual worlds and design systems that help brands grow — from building a new brand from scratch to producing high-volume, hardworking assets across e-commerce, paid, social, and CRM. Success in this role isn't measured by how many assets are produced; it's measured by how distinctive our brands look, how effectively design drives commercial results, and how well the team scales quality without slowing down.

You could be a great fit if...

• You naturally balance a strong aesthetic point of view with the discipline needed to scale design across many brands.
• You enjoy translating positioning, GTM strategy, and creative platforms into clear, distinctive visual direction.
• You know how brand worlds need to flex across e-commerce, paid, social, CRM, and marketplaces without losing coherence.
• You thrive on building design systems, templates, and working standards that let teams move fast without compromising quality.
• You enjoy leading and mentoring designers, giving direction that develops people rather than just correcting their work.
• You proactively use performance data to sharpen design decisions rather than treating creative as purely subjective.
• You can confidently raise the bar on work before it reaches founders, holding a high standard of craft.
• You enjoy building playbooks and repeatable systems that make multiple brands and teams better, rather than just producing one-off assets.
• You're comfortable designing for global audiences and understand how visual language shifts across markets like North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Requirements

• 8-10+ years of experience in Design, Art Direction, or Design Direction within advertising, branding, digital, or integrated agencies and/or high-growth consumer brands.
• Proven experience leading, mentoring, and developing multidisciplinary design teams.
• An exceptional portfolio demonstrating a clear aesthetic point of view across brand identity, digital, e-commerce, campaigns, and social.
• Proven experience building brands and visual worlds from the ground up.
• Experience translating brand worlds into high-quality, high-volume asset production.
• Strong understanding of e-commerce, DTC, and digital marketing environments.
• Strong understanding of still and motion design, with the ability to direct multidisciplinary creative talent.
• Advanced capability across Adobe Creative Suite, including Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.
• Highly proficient in Figma and comfortable using Canva within scalable brand systems.
• Experience working across multiple brands simultaneously.

Bonus Points

• Experience working with SMEs, start-ups, or entrepreneurial/high-growth consumer businesses.
• Strong experience in presentation and deck design.
• Experience working across key markets — North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand — with strong awareness of cultural and aesthetic differences.
• Experience extending brand worlds into packaging, retail, POS, or physical experiences.
• Familiarity with using AI to accelerate design development, adaptation, and production without replacing craft or judgement.
• Experience building reusable design systems, prompts, or templates that can be embedded into AI-driven workflows.

You probably shouldn't apply if...

• You prefer producing individual assets over building the systems that let a whole team produce them.
• You see design as a purely aesthetic exercise, disconnected from commercial or performance outcomes.
• You're uncomfortable giving direct, constructive feedback that raises the bar on other designers' work.
• You'd rather go deep on one brand than balance design leadership across a portfolio of brands.
• You're uncomfortable with the pace and volume required by fast-growing e-commerce brands.
• You prefer highly structured environments where visual direction rarely evolves.