Global Creative Director

The Global Creative Director is the creative intelligence of the Valerie POD system. This is not an execution role. You own the creative voice of every brand in the portfolio, working directly alongside POD Leaders to set direction, raise the creative ceiling, and unlock the kind of work that drives exponential commercial performance.

You are the person every POD Leader calls when the creative is not breaking through, when a brand needs a voice, or when the team needs to think bigger.

You are an educator, supporter and consultant to Founders in ensuring PODs can focus (most) on what it takes to scale.

Accountabilities

Creative Strategy and Direction

• Own the creative strategy across every brand in the portfolio. Translate positioning, audience insight, and behavioural data into a clear creative direction each POD can execute against.

• Identify the creative unlock for each brand. The one angle, format, or voice shift that will break the current ceiling with POD teams.

• Ensure all creative output across paid, organic, UGC, email, and landing pages is coherent with the brand's identity and where the culture is heading.

• Stay ahead of every relevant trend, format shift, and cultural moment. You should know what is about to break before competitors do.

POD Partnership and Creative Leadership

• Work directly with POD Leaders as the embedded creative authority for their brands. A genuine thought partner, not a reviewer.

• Run regular creative reviews across the portfolio. Identify what is working, what has capped out, and what to test next. Make specific recommendations.

• Primarily ensure our payments and commercial requirements are achieved and kept 2-3 months ahead of the curve, per brand, per market.

• Raise the creative aptitude of the entire team through workshops, references, frameworks, and a culture where the work is consistently better than the brief required.

• Protect creative integrity against the pressure to produce quickly. Speed does not justify undifferentiated work.

Culture and Consumer Intelligence

• Develop deep understanding of the consumer psychology behind each brand's audience. Know what they believe, how they speak, and what earns their attention.

• Build and maintain creative intelligence for each brand category. Track competitors, emerging brands, and cultural movements relevant to the portfolio.

• Use Valerie's behavioural intelligence layer to form creative hypotheses and test them with discipline.

• Research and ensure teams know competitor brands, ads, acquisition and retention tactics that are working for others.

Creative Systems

• Build reusable creative systems for the POD team. Playbooks, testing frameworks, UGC direction guides, and copy voice documents teams can execute from without starting from scratch.

• Own brief quality across the portfolio. A weak brief produces weak work. This role is accountable before any creative is made.

• Step in before escalations and obstacles rear for founders and mentor Pod and train team members on creative and commercial founder consulting.

What we are looking for

The greatest creative directors working in DTC share a specific combination of capabilities this role must embody.

• Culture-first thinking. The best DTC creative participates in culture, it does not interrupt it.

• Psychological literacy. They know which emotional levers to pull for each audience and can articulate exactly why a piece of creative will or will not land.

• Data as a creative signal. They can look at a performance report and extract a creative hypothesis, not just a summary.

• A genuine point of view. Defensible, specific, held under pressure.

• They make the team better. Obsessive with references, specific with feedback, relentless about creative ambition.

• Full funnel fluency. From a 3-second scroll stop to a 90-day retention email.

• Collaboration leadership, to inspire and empower others without any ego.

• Commercial smarts, to understand valuation and customer profit play a critical role in scale, not simply creative beauty.

Ideal Behaviour, Qualifications & Skills

• Opinionated, kind and decisive. Has a point of view and states it clearly.

• Commercially grounded. Holds creative excellence and founder realities in the same hand.

• Obsessively curious. Always consuming references and bringing that intelligence into the work.

• Elevates the team. Gives feedback that makes people better, not just feedback that corrects.

• Brand-protective. Pushes back on work that is efficient but forgettable.

Experience & Skills

• 7+ years in creative strategy or creative direction, with significant DTC or performance brand experience

• Proven track record of creative work tied to measurable commercial outcomes

• Deep knowledge of paid social creative, UGC strategy, email creative, and brand identity

• Experience briefing and directing creative teams, freelancers, and UGC creators

• Comfortable working with performance data to inform and validate creative direction

• Multi-brand or agency portfolio experience strongly preferred

• Exceptional written and verbal communication

Key Performance Indicators

• Founder Relation management

• Creative Win Rate: percentage of creative hypotheses that outperform existing control

• Growth Forecast: Underachieving

• Growth Forecast: Overachieving

• Business Outcome: collaboration with portfolio lead to maximise on experiments

• Team Creative Aptitude: measurable improvement in team creative quality over time

• Brand Creative Health: POD Leader and founder satisfaction with creative direction

• Ensuring the implementation of Brand Learning: uptake of frameworks and playbooks across the portfolio

• Urgent important print management

• Anticipating ahead for obstacles

• Company values