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 d