Head of Content and Creative

We're hiring exclusively on behalf of an SEO agency for an SEO Account Manager. This is a confidential search, so the client is not named here. We'll tell you exactly who they are on our first call.
This is a brand within the wellness DTC sector.
The Role
We're looking for a Head of Creative & Content to run the engine that makes everything a customer sees from the brand — paid creative, organic social, launch and retail content, creator briefs, copy and design. One team, one pipeline, one standard, serving brand and growth.
The brand is a founder-led brand with a strong point of view and a real brand standard: premium, provenance, science — never hype. What we're missing is the leader who governs creative output and turns it into a content machine: someone who decides what gets made, what gets scaled and what gets killed, and who builds the team and the systems so that it happens every week without routing through the founders.
This is not a design director role and it is not a production role. We already ship paid creative at top-band volume for our category. Selection and creative vision, not throughput, is the job — fixing what gets made, not how fast it ships. You'll report to the CMO, sit on the marketing leadership team alongside our Heads of Brand, Growth and Retention, and lead a team of around five direct reports.
Three things need to be true of you at once.
You have the eye. You don't need to be a designer, art director or editor yourself — but you non-negotiably need excellent taste, brand eye and a track record of being right about it. You can look at a concept and say why it will or won't work before it's made. You know what a great brand looks like across paid, organic, retail and web, you study what winning brands are doing, and you hold a high bar without becoming precious about it. Rough and native can be the right answer; you know when.
You run systems. You've built and run the operating rhythm of a creative team before — intake, briefs, SLAs, approval tiers, a weekly readout — and it outlasted you. You think in pipelines and hit rates, not one-off pieces. You understand how a paid testing queue works, how organic, influencer and paid feed each other, and why a brief is a performance document with a hypothesis in it.
You lead people — and you want to. Around five people across five crafts not working in a physical space with you. You grow strategists, editors, designers, copywriters and social leads into people who own their lane. You'll build part of this team rather than inherit it: 1-2 seats are sequenced behind your arrival so the leader shapes the hub.
If you're two of the three, this isn't the role. We've met plenty of excellent creative directors who've never owned a testing queue, and plenty of excellent performance strategists who've never held a brand standard. We're looking for the overlap.
What the Job Involves
Own the content pipeline end to end
Lead one Creative Hub that serves brand, performance, social, launches and retail from a single unit — creative strategy, video production and editing, design, copy and organic social.
Decide which concepts get made and which get scaled. Direct the angle inventory, the testing roadmap and the creative readouts your strategists run, in partnership with Growth's testing queue.
Ensure every asset that leaves the hub is on-standard and substantiated, working inside a pre-cleared claims library.
Set the creative vision inside the brand standard
Translate the brand standard into a creative vision for how Manukora shows up on every surface: paid social, organic, web, email, Amazon and retail.
Be the taste standard in the room. Give clear, specific creative direction to strategists, editors and designers, and raise the bar of what "good" means here.
Bring an outside view: what winning brands are doing, what's moving in ad libraries and culture, and translate how that applies to Manukora.
Build and run the operating system
Stand up the hub's operating system in your first quarter: intake, briefs, SLAs, approval tiers, and the weekly rhythm that connects the paid readout to next week's briefs.
Make the work inspectable and team accountable: clear briefs, visible hypotheses, honest readouts. Build self-serve systems and templates so the team and partners can create on-brand without you in every loop.
Lead and grow the team
Manage, coach and develop your team across creative strategy, production, design, copy and social. Hire the remaining seats in the hub.
Set clear lanes, goals and single owners. Build a culture where people bring their sharpest thinking, take ownership, and get better every quarter.
Connect organic, paid and retail cross functional operations
Make organic social an owned engine with real editorial direction — reactive, episodic and campaign tracks and translate that to paid.
Partner with Growth on the testing queue and whitelisting, with Influencer & Partnerships so every creator brief is written for paid and organic from day one, and with Retention so lifecycle content is supplied on a queue with an SLA.
Own launch and retail content as a named lane as we scale into national retail: shopper content, in-store assets, and creative that makes people walk in looking for us.
Make it measurable and modern
Own the hub's metrics
Use AI as a core part of the team's workflow — research, ideation, versioning, localisation and production efficiency — without letting it flatten the brand.
Manage external partners (packaging agency, shoot contractors, specialist creative) and decide what stays in-house and what we buy.
Who You Are
You've led a content or creative team of three or more that served both brand and performance — in-house at a US DTC or consumer brand (wellness is a plus), or at a performance-native agency where you owned the outcome, not just the output.
Your path here most likely runs through creative strategy, organic social, or paid-social creative leadership, combined with a strong creative sensibility. You may or may not have a craft background; you definitely have an eye.
You've personally written briefs and read creative-level ad data. You know what a hook rate is and why it matters, and you can debate with a media buyer on the merits.
You know the difference between content that looks good in a deck and content that performs on a phone.
You've built operating systems — intake, SLAs, approval tiers, weekly rhythms — that a team still uses after you moved on.
You're a leader people want to work for. You've hired, grown and, where necessary, moved people on. Years of management experience matter less to us than whether you're natively good at it and want it.
You have a deep respect for a strong brand standard and the judgement to know when to push on it. You can hold "premium, provenance, science" and "rough, native, scroll-stopping" in your head at the same time.
You're commercially minded. You connect creative decisions to customers, contribution and shelf velocity, not awards.
You anticipate problems and flag them early with your analysis and a proposed path. You bring structured recommendations, not open-ended problems.
You're curious, adaptable, and at home in a fast-moving, founder-led business.
A plus: food, wellness or supplement experience; regulated-claims environments; retail launch experience; experience building creator pipelines.
What This Role Is Not
Not the brand-identity creator. Our founders set the brand direction, you set the creative vision inside it, with a real say on a small, agreed set of bolder swings each quarter.
Not a hands-on maker seat. You can and will roll up your sleeves, but the job needs to be able to operate at a high level setting direction, selection and leadership.
Not a calendar or traffic role. You'll have a producer/ops seat for that. If your instinct is to build the calendar rather than fix what's on it, this isn't the role.

Work arrangement
Yes