Founding Creative Director

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Founding Creative Director based in Italy.** As Founding Creative Director, you will define the creative standard for a fast-moving company entering a period of significant product and brand growth. You will own creative direction across launches, positioning, storytelling, design systems, and every major customer-facing artifact. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will personally ship work while establishing the creative bar for the organization. You will work closely with the founding team in a highly autonomous, distributed, and low-bureaucracy environment. Over time, you will build a small internal creative team spanning design, motion, and content. The pace is intense, the feedback loop is short, and your decisions will have a direct impact on what reaches the market. This is an opportunity for a highly opinionated creative leader who wants to set the standard rather than inherit one. ### Accountabilities - Own the creative vision and direction across the brand, ensuring consistency and excellence across every customer-facing touchpoint. - Define narrative, positioning, and creative strategy for product launches, treating design as a strategic business tool rather than decoration. - Personally create and ship high-impact work during the first year, including landing pages, launch videos, presentations, social content, and other go-to-market assets. - Own and evolve the design system, establishing a scalable creative foundation for future products and campaigns. - Act as the ultimate creative quality bar, creating or approving anything that is released under the brand. - Partner directly with the founding team to turn complex products and ideas into compelling stories, experiences, and market-facing narratives. - Build and eventually lead a lean internal creative function of approximately two to three people across design, motion, and content. - Establish processes that allow the creative team to brief, position, produce, and launch work independently without relying heavily on external agencies. - Maintain a high standard of execution while managing multiple launches and priorities in a rapidly changing environment. - Champion the effective use of AI throughout the creative workflow, identifying new tools and workflows that improve speed, experimentation, and quality. ## Requirements - Demonstrated experience owning creative direction, whether in-house or within an agency, with evidence of making final creative decisions rather than simply executing against direction. - Exceptional creative taste and the ability to articulate, defend, and apply a clear point of view about what makes work distinctive and effective. - Strong narrative and strategic thinking, with the ability to connect design, positioning, storytelling, and business objectives. - A portfolio demonstrating high-quality creative work across relevant formats such as digital experiences, branding, campaigns, launch materials, editorial, motion, or consumer-facing products. - The versatility to operate across different creative disciplines and industries; experience in SaaS is not required, while backgrounds in fashion, art, editorial, consumer brands, or similarly design-led environments are welcome. - A proven ability to deliver excellent work in high-speed, ambiguous environments, with multiple priorities and rapidly evolving feedback. - Hands-on experience with AI as part of the creative or product-development workflow. You should be comfortable experimenting with AI tools and have already used AI to build, prototype, design, or create something tangible. - Strong interest in becoming increasingly technical and capable of independently shipping a landing page or similar digital experience within your first year. - A proactive, low-ego approach with strong ownership, direct communication, sound judgment, and a willingness to act without waiting for permission. - Comfort working asynchronously within a globally distributed team and communicating clearly through writing. - High standards combined with the ability to move quickly, adapt to changing priorities, and maintain quality under pressure. - A genuine interest in emerging AI capabilities and a willingness to continuously experiment, learn, and share effective workflows with others. ## Benefits - Competitive salary plus equity or stock grants, giving you the opportunity to own a meaningful part of what you help build. - High degree of autonomy and ownership, with responsibility for solving problems rather than simply completing assigned tasks. - Direct exposure to the founding team and the opportunity to have your creative decisions reach the market without layers of internal approval. - Fully distributed, global, and async-first working environment with low bureaucracy and a strong emphasis on written communication. - The opportunity to define the creative standard and build a new internal creative function from the ground up. - Work that reaches real consumer brands and has visible impact on a rapidly evolving category. - Learning budget to support continued professional and creative development. - Access to premium AI tools, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity Pro, Cursor, and Lovable. - Quarterly budget for experimenting with new AI and creative tools. - A culture that encourages knowledge sharing through demos, discussions, and collaboration around emerging AI workflows. - An environment built around trust, direct feedback, high standards, and meaningful ownership. - The opportunity to work at the intersection of creativity, technology, AI, and the future of customer experience.