Department Manager - Own Brand Designer

Key Responsibilities:

Creative Leadership & Direction

• Set and maintain high creative standards across digital campaigns, e-commerce, social media, and offline communication.
• Lead creative direction from brief interpretation and concept development through final execution.
• Guide the team in applying strong design fundamentals including composition, typography, color, hierarchy, branding, and visual storytelling.
• Provide clear, constructive, and actionable creative feedback that helps designers continuously improve.
• Encourage fresh thinking, experimentation, and diverse creative approaches.
• Ensure creative output is visually compelling, brand-consistent, customer-relevant, and aligned with business objectives.

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, coach, and develop designers based on their strengths, development needs, and career potential.
• Strengthen the team's capabilities in creative thinking, concept development, visual communication, and problem-solving.
• Conduct regular creative reviews, coaching, feedback, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
• Establish clear creative expectations and support designers in taking greater ownership of their work.
• Identify capability development priorities and create opportunities for continuous learning and growth.
• Foster a collaborative environment that encourages ownership, curiosity, constructive feedback, and creative excellence.
• Identify and develop high-potential talent within the team.

Creative Strategy & Business Partnership

• Translate business, marketing, campaign, and customer objectives into clear creative strategies and visual direction.
• Develop the team's understanding of customers, products, commercial priorities, and campaign objectives to strengthen creative decision-making.
• Partner closely with Marketing, Media, Commercial, E-commerce, and other cross-functional teams to develop effective creative solutions.
• Interpret briefs strategically, identify opportunities to strengthen communication, and recommend appropriate creative approaches.
• Influence and align stakeholders through strong creative rationale, customer insight, business context, and performance learnings.
• Balance creative ambition with customer needs, commercial objectives, timelines, and operational requirements.

Performance & Creative Effectiveness

• Use customer insights, campaign performance, and creative learnings to continuously improve creative effectiveness.
• Encourage structured creative experimentation and meaningful creative variations across campaigns and channels.
• Translate performance learnings into practical creative principles and recommendations for future work.
• Establish appropriate quality and performance measures to support continuous improvement.
• Share creative learnings across the team to strengthen collective capability and decision-making.

Innovation, AI & Future Creative Capability

• Explore and adopt AI, automation, and emerging creative technologies that can enhance ideation, creative quality, and productivity.
• Guide designers in using AI and digital tools effectively and responsibly as part of the creative process.
• Identify opportunities to create smarter and more scalable creative workflows.
• Encourage experimentation with new creative approaches, formats, tools, and technologies.
• Turn successful experiments and learnings into practical ways of working that can be scaled across the team.
• Stay informed about evolving design, content, technology, and consumer trends and identify relevant opportunities for the business.

Creative Operations & Continuous Improvement

• Manage creative priorities and resources to deliver high-quality work across multiple projects and channels.
• Collaborate with project and traffic management to align priorities, capacity, timelines, and expectations.
• Establish efficient creative review and approval processes.
• Maintain strong standards for quality, accuracy, brand consistency, and on-time delivery.
• Identify opportunities to continuously improve creative processes, tools, and ways of working.
• Support the team in adapting effectively to changing business priorities, customer expectations, and technologies.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Graphic Design, Visual Communication, Communication Design, Fine Arts, Multimedia Design, or a related field.
• Strong professional experience in graphic design, creative direction, campaign design, or related creative disciplines.
• Proven experience leading, coaching, and developing a team of graphic designers.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating excellent creative judgment and expertise in typography, composition, color, hierarchy, branding, and visual communication.
• Experience across digital campaigns, e-commerce, social media, and offline/commercial communication is preferred.
• Strong ability to translate business, marketing, and customer objectives into effective creative solutions.
• Strong communication, presentation, stakeholder management, and influencing skills.
• Experience working in a fast-paced environment with multiple projects, priorities, and stakeholders.
• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, and modern creative workflows.
• Experience with AI-assisted creative tools, generative AI, automation, or emerging creative technologies is highly preferred.
• Experience introducing new creative approaches, developing team capabilities, or evolving creative ways of working is an advantage.
• Good command of English communication and ability to work effectively with cross-functional stakeholders.