Job Description

Your mission

Fixed term contract. \xc2\xa395k FTE - London Based, hybrid working, 2 days a week in our Bloomsbury office.

Overview

We\xe2\x80\x99re looking for a hands-on, experienced creative director or design leader to take the reins of our small but mighty in-house brand and design team at Wonderbly for nine months to cover maternity leave.

This is a full time position with a minimum of two days per week working from our central London studio. Ideally the role begins in late November to allow for some handover with our Creative Director Karen Martin and then the cover will run from January 1st to September 30th 2024.

About the role

Our Creative Director manages a small but important team of multidisciplinary creatives and designers covering three core design disciplines of brand design, content and digital product design.

This team looks after the (frankly rather wonderful) Wonderbly brand in the broadest sense, maintaining our various design systems, template libraries and other documentation and managing quality across many projects working with external partners.

The team also produces lots of direct design deliverables for internal stakeholders across the company. They produce all the content to support launches of our books for the publishing team. They manage digital design outputs for the technology group. And, most significantly, they produce the majority of our creative assets for our marketing team.

Alongside this they also deliver their own special projects throughout the year, organizing major design led projects such as our seasonal photoshoots, tentpole campaigns and annual packaging refreshes.

The Creative Director is the overall manager of all this work and sits on our Leadership team alongside other senior managers. The role reports to our Chief Product Officer Nick Marsh who is a member of the Exec team. There are three direct reports to this role and an overall team of six permanent staff and a large network of long term freelance collaborators. The role is supported by a Creative Operations team with a dedicated resource manager for this studio.

A little bit about you

We\xe2\x80\x99re looking for a safe pair of hands to look after this very important team. We\xe2\x80\x99re very proud of our brand and the quality of the design work our small team produces and we want someone that will care as much as we do about creating a great place to do great creative work.

Some of the things we are looking for in this person are:

Experience managing an in house design studio or creative team at a direct to consumer brand - in short, you have seen this before

A good breadth of design management experience - you are able to mentor and support senior designers with different design specialisms as individuals and at a group level

Experience managing a busy studio with multiple work streams at different stages - you able to move easily between detailed design support work and more strategic activities

Great eye for detail and passionate about quality - you are confident at managing design reviews, critiquing briefs and will send work back if it\xe2\x80\x99s not right

Great written and verbal communication skills - confident at making the case for design with non designers and communicating up and across the business about the work you and your team are doing through presentations and in person meetings

Passion for our category - you are excited about books, gifting and, most importantly the core of our brand proposition to create meaningful connections between people through our personalised products

How to apply

Please send across your CV and a short portfolio of sample brand and design projects that you have led or creatively directed in recent years, along with a short note on what you think is most exciting about the Wonderbly brand.

Our interview process will consist of two interviews, ideally one of which will be face to face and in our central London studio in Bloomsbury.

About us

Oh hi! We\xe2\x80\x99re delighted that you\xe2\x80\x99re interested in working with , the UK Children\xe2\x80\x99s Publisher of the Year 2021. Below you\xe2\x80\x99ll find out all about us, our mission and values, and the roles we have open right now.

Wonderbly is the world\xe2\x80\x99s leading personalised publishing company. We conceive, design, promote, sell, and make wonderful books for wonderful customers all over the world.

Our mission is to make people feel extraordinarily special, and bring them closer to the people they love, through the power of personalised stories. So far we\xe2\x80\x99ve shipped over 8 million books to over 150 countries. We\xe2\x80\x99ve done this in just eight years, and we\xe2\x80\x99re just getting started.

Getting personalised books to all those millions of customers requires a multidisciplinary team. Our wonderful people have experience across editorial design, research, production, software engineering, marketing, e-commerce, data analysis, print-on-demand manufacturing, shipping\xe2\x80\xa6 the list goes on.

This means that Wonderbly is a collaborative and creative place to work, with lots of opportunities for growth and development across a broad range of skills.

We\xe2\x80\x99re based in London, where we have a gorgeous, light-filled studio for working together. But like many digital-first companies, we have a hybrid operating model, with many colleagues working from home and further afoot much of the time.

Our values

Wonderbly\xe2\x80\x99s values were born from the three qualities at the heart of \xe2\x80\x98Lost My Name\xe2\x80\x99 - our original and best-selling personalised children\xe2\x80\x99s book. These values are Courage, Curiosity and Kindness. And although they naturally have a child-friendly ring to them, these are deeply human values that we believe everyone should live by.

Courage means taking calculated risks and trying things that no one else would. It means setting audacious goals, seeing them through, and being willing to be wrong.

Curiosity means investing in learning, never losing sight of the \xe2\x80\x98WHY\xe2\x80\x99. Curiosity allows us to ask silly questions, explore our blind spots, and dip into other disciplines for inspiration.

Kindness is at the heart of our culture: it\xe2\x80\x99s no coincidence that deep friendships form here every day. Kindness means making space for one another, inclusivity as standard, and clear, direct communication. It does not mean \xe2\x80\x9cgood vibes only\xe2\x80\x9d: the kindest conversations are often the hardest.

Equal opportunities employer

Our team is committed to providing equal opportunities for employment regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, disability, family structure, socio-economic status, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other basis (it\'s the law, but it\'s also just the right thing to do).

If you have a disability, caring duties, or any other additional needs that require consideration, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them during the application process.

To see more about our business and products, you can visit us at

Wonderbly