Senior Art Director

Job description

Smalls is a premium DTC cat food and cat lifestyle brand built on a single belief: the cats who matter most to their people deserve food that actually reflects that. We make fresh, human-grade food for cats, and we've spent eight years building a brand that looks and feels as considered as the product inside the bag. We're a focused team building a category-defining brand. The people here are good at their jobs, take the work seriously, and care about getting it right. We're growing into new categories and new channels, and we need our creative function to grow with us. WHAT YOU'LL OWN - Visual creative leadership. Brand standards, taste, and final say on what ships. You are the visual authority at every touchpoint. When something doesn't look like Smalls, you catch it and fix it. - Art direction across all surfaces. You'll concept and direct shoots, oversee creative production, and ensure the visual system holds across growth creative, retail displays, packaging, site, social, merch, physical product design, campaign, OOH, email, and collabs — whatever the context, the brand is recognizable and right. - Meta and performance creative. You own social creative as a distinct creative domain, not just another channel in the list. That means the full marketing creative lens — photo, video, creator-style content, captions, audio — and the strategy that ties it together. You'll set what good looks like in feed, lead the art direction for performance work, and hold the bar for social-native craft. This is one of the primary reasons we're hiring this role; the CBO is leaning into it as a learning area, and the SAD is expected to lead it. - Agency oversight and decision-making. Ultimate decision-making on creative agency work sits with you. You lead agency selection, own the overall briefing, and make the final call on what ships. The CBO will weigh in on direction and review assets, but the decision lives with the SAD — you pick the partners, you set the brief, you call the work. - Team leadership. You'll manage our Senior Designer, Graphic Designer, and two Product Designers day to day. This means real creative oversight, not just people management. You'll give direction on work, make calls on large design decisions, and keep the product designers brand-aligned rather than purely conversion-focused. You're comfortable working across both graphic design and product/UX contexts — you don't need to be a UX practitioner, but you understand the discipline well enough to direct it and hold the brand bar within it. - Creative process ownership. You'll define and maintain the creative processes that govern how work moves through the team — from brief to production to final output. You'll set the standards, own the oversight, and ensure the creative function operates with rigor and consistency. - Cross-functional bridge work. You'll move work through the org, resolve misalignment between creative and other departments before it becomes a bottleneck, and be the creative voice in rooms where brand logic needs an advocate. - Evolving the system. Smalls is entering new categories. The visual system needs to expand to meet them. You'll evaluate what the brand demands in new contexts, write briefs, connect the dots across departments, and make the case for or against creative decisions with confidence. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR You have 7+ years of experience, with meaningful time in-house at a brand where you had to hold visual standards across channels without a large team or agency infrastructure doing it for you. You've art directed shoots. You've managed designers. You've been the person who catches drift before it ships. You think in systems, not assets. You can look at a brief, a collab proposal, or a new product category and ask: what does the brand demand here? And then answer that question with conviction. You have strong enough design instincts to give the design team real creative direction, not just approvals. You understand the difference between a brand-led product experience and a conversion-optimized one, and you know how to hold the former while respecting the latter. You have working fluency in both graphic design and UX/UI contexts — enough to direct product designers meaningfully and hold the brand standard across digital surfaces, not just print and campaign. You manage well. The team here is talented, detail-oriented, and tends toward caution. You bring clarity and creative energy without creating anxiety. You can make a decisive call and move on. You have a cat, or you're genuinely willing to get one. This isn't a culture fit checkbox — it's functional. You'll be briefing, directing, and evaluating work about cat food, cat behavior, and the cat-owner relationship every single day. The feedback loop of living with a cat is real and it matters. You're a communicator. You can write a brief, explain a direction, push back on a request, and present your thinking to a founder without hedging everything into mush. You're comfortable being the operational creative center of the function. The CBO is a strategic leader who comes in for direction, taste, and high-level decisions. The day-to-day runs through you. WHAT WE DON'T NEED Someone who wants to rebuild everything. The visual system is strong and the team knows it. Your job is to evolve it, not replace it. Someone who needs a lot of management to function. You'll have the CBO's attention for the things that matter. The rest is yours to run. Someone whose creative confidence only shows up in a portfolio. We need it in how you talk about work, how you give feedback, and how you hold a position when someone pushes back. THE TEAM YOU'RE JOINING You'll be working alongside ACD, Copy and Director of Integrated Brand Ops, and managing a design team of four including Sr. Designer, Graphic Designer, and two Product Designers. You'll report to Chief Brand Officer. Smalls is fully remote with occasional travel for shoots, company offsites, and key creative moments. WHAT YOU’LL LOVE ABOUT US: - Mission-Driven Company: We love cats and we're here to make nine lives ten. - People-Driven Company: We treat our people like people; we're committed to Smalls, and we work hard but also respect everyone’s lives outside of work. - Data-Driven Culture: We love using data to guide decision-making where appropriate, but we also know when to move quickly and go with our gut. - Competitive Salary: Make some $$$. - Very Competitive Benefits: Fully paid Health, Vision, and Dental insurance. 4-day work week. Unlimited PTO. - Fully Remote Office & Culture: Our team is spread across the US day to day, but we travel for department & company off-sites and retreats. - Free Product: Free cat food every month.