Design Lead

Department: Brand

Employment Type: Full-Time Regular

FLSA Classification: Salaried, Exempt

Reports To: VP of Brand

Travel Requirements: Less than 10%

Work Location: Remote - Green Bay/Chicago preferred

Expected Working Hours: Monday - Friday 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM CST

Role Summary:

The Design Lead is a hands-on creative role responsible for bringing the Vital Essentials brand to life across digital, e-commerce, packaging, retail, and integrated marketing. This role brings fresh, distinctive thinking that helps the brand stand apart. This role partners cross-functionally across marketing, e-commerce, and innovation to deliver compelling visual and storytelling assets that strengthen the company's brand presence and support growth objectives. As a team leader, this individual manages internal and external creative resources, oversees the full design process from concept to completion, and ensures all materials meet brand standards of quality, creativity, and timeliness.

Role Responsibilities and Essential Functions:

• Creative Development: Collaborate with brand leadership and external creative partners to develop campaign concepts, visual storytelling, and creative solutions that support brand and business objectives. Generate disruptive, culturally relevant ideas that break category conventions, earn attention, and give the brand an outsized presence in the market.
• Design Execution: Create high-quality design across packaging, retail, trade shows, sales materials, and other brand communications, taking projects from initial concept through final production.
• Performance Marketing: Concept and produce compelling paid and organic content for Meta, TikTok, Amazon SBV, Amazon DSP, and other digital platforms, incorporating performance insights to continuously improve creative effectiveness.
• E-Commerce: Develop conversion-focused creative for Amazon, Chewy, and DTC channels, including storefronts, PDP imagery, A+ content, website assets, and email.
• Content Production: Plan and provide creative direction for photo and video shoots, collaborating with external production partners to develop proprietary brand assets.
• Brand Stewardship: Maintain and evolve the brand's visual identity, ensuring consistency across all consumer and customer touchpoints. Create and own brand book, guidelines, and style systems.
• Creative Leadership: Provide guidance and mentorship to the Graphic Designer, coordinate external creative resources, and manage competing project priorities to ensure quality and timely delivery.
• Project & Asset Management: Oversee the organization, deployment, and utilization of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) system.

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design, Visual Communication, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• A strong portfolio demonstrating exceptional design craft, conceptual thinking, and experience across multiple channels, including bold, unconventional ideas that challenged category norms or helped a brand stand apart.
• Minimum of 7 years of progressive experience in creative design and brand development, including print and digital media such as paid social, e-commerce, video, packaging, in-store, and digital advertising.
• Prior experience mentoring junior designers.
• Experience managing external agencies, contractors, and creative partners required.
• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects) or similar design software required.
• Experience working with Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems preferred.

Skills and Abilities:

A successful Design Lead will:

• Execute Senior Graphic Design Projects:
• Demonstrate exceptional design craft, including typography, composition, hierarchy, image selection, and attention to detail.
• Be a bold conceptual thinker who challenges predictable solutions, questions category conventions, and turns unconventional ideas into clear, ownable creative platforms.
• Demonstrate a challenger-brand mindset by taking smart creative risks, finding disruptive ways to earn attention, and creating work with an impact greater than the brand's size or resources.
• Understand how to translate brand strategy into compelling visual communication and storytelling.
• Balance creative quality with speed, producing and iterating a high volume of digitally native work without sacrificing craft or brand consistency.

• Bring Digital Expertise:
• Demonstrate deep fluency in how creative must adapt across digital platforms, placements, formats, audiences, and stages of the consumer journey.
• Bring strong digitally native expertise, with an instinctive understanding of platform behaviors, emerging formats, social-first storytelling, and the creative conventions that drive attention and action.
• Demonstrate strong performance marketing expertise, using audience insights, creative testing, and campaign results to develop hypotheses, identify winning approaches, and improve creative effectiveness.
• Ability to partner with media/communication strategy peers to interpret digital key performance indicators-including engagement, click-through rate, conversion, and return on ad spend-using learnings to guide future concepts, formats, and executions.

• Be a Creative Leader:
• Be highly organized and able to manage multiple projects, priorities, and deadlines.
• Collaborate effectively with brand, marketing, e-commerce, and other cross-functional partners.
• Communicate creative thinking clearly and be comfortable presenting and defending design decisions.
• Be comfortable giving creative direction to external partners and mentoring less-experienced designers.
• Bring an established network of trusted freelance creative talent that can be tapped as needed for graphic design, video editing, motion graphics, and other specialized production support.
• Be curious, adaptable, and motivated to continually improve the work.
• Bring a challenger-brand mindset: move with urgency, question the status quo, take smart creative risks, and find inventive ways to make a disproportionate impact.
• Be excited and proud to represent the Carnivore Meat Company brand and products.
• Balance creativity with business objectives so designs meet both aesthetic and strategic goals.

Requirements

Physical Requirements:

This position sits in a standard office environment with potential interaction with the operation and warehouse facilities. The office does allow pets, so one must be comfortable with pets. The role will require the usage of standard technology such as phones, computers, printer/scanning, etc. While the intent of this role is to operate during standard business hours, there may be times when it is required to work extended hours, evenings, holidays, and/or weekends.

The physical demands must be met with or without accommodation for an employee to be successful in performing the essential job functions of this role. This includes regular and frequent walking, listening, sitting, standing, use of hands and fingers, and the ability to push or lift up to 15 pounds.


Role Disclosure and Acknowledgement:

The Role Description does not contain all lists of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of this role but is intended to be a general summary of the essential functions and qualifications to perform the tasks of the role. Duties may change at any time, with or without notice. By signing the below, you agree to have read the description in full and understand the requirements, essential functions, and duties of this role.