Senior Creative & Visual Merchandising Lead

The Role:

The Senior Creative & Visual Merchandising Lead will report to the Creative Director and work with the creative and marketing team to manage all internal and external creative brand expression and visual merchandising, ensuring that all creative assets meet the highest standards of creativity, aesthetics, and brand consistency. The creative output will engage customers, enhance their experience, and drive sales.

You will partner with different departments, including marketing, commercial and growth, and the creative team, to create a cohesive brand message and visual aesthetic that aligns with the company's overall business goals.

At Kao, we offer amazing benefits that are available to you on your first day of employment (healthcare, 401(k) plus company match), 36 total days off (vacation + holidays + sick) and a reasonable salary range of $110,000 - $125,000. We also offer a hybrid work schedule.

What you will do:

• Visual Merchandising Conceptualization, Design and Maintenance: Develop and execute VM strategies and offer end-to-end VM services reflecting brand voice and achieve business objectives. This includes creating 360 VM plans for key department stores, specialty-multi stores and salons. Creates and implements launches and permanent visual merchandising assets, tools and guidelines, while ensuring a cohesive omni brand experience. Leads VM strategies, creation and production of VM design and units with agency or directly with manufacturing -- must align with overall creative direction for the brand across all channels. This includes collaborating on mood boards and design concepts to ensure consistency across all visual touchpoints and departments. Includes designing and executing window displays, in-store displays, pop-ups, shelf-design for key retailers and salons, as well as supporting Education and PR eventing.
• Design Creation, Execution and Conceptualization: * Fostering original and visually captivating designs for an extensive spectrum of marketing resources encompassing assets across all channels, from print to digital content, social media assets, packaging design, visual merchandising and beyond. Skillfully harmonizing textual content and visual constituents to engender designs that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also engrossing and immersive, as well as conceptually sound.
• Persuasive Communication and Exemplary Presentation: * Aptly conveying design concepts and the rationale behind them to upper management and stakeholders, articulately elucidating the alignment between the design and overarching project goals. * Skillfully transmitting design concepts, ideas, and feedback across team members, fostering a collaborative environment ripe for ideation and refinement. Influencing internal and external partners and leaders to ensure buy-in. Synergizing with multifaceted and interdisciplinary teams, encompassing marketing, copywriting, and other functional units, to gain a comprehensive grasp of design prerequisites and contribute to the holistic success of projects and campaigns.
• Holistic Project Supervision:* Guiding and orchestrating the lifecycle of design projects, shepherding them from conception to fruition while meticulously adhering to timelines and objectives.* Forging partnerships with cross-functional teams to glean comprehensive design requisites and seamlessly translate them into impactful visual resolutions.* Exhibiting dedication to brand uniformity by adhering to and preserving an intricate understanding of brand standards, ensuring that all design outputs remain faithful to the brand's visual identity and messaging. Purposely seeking and dispensing constructive feedback as a conduit for refining the design process and bolstering collaborative dynamics within the design team.
• Conduct regular Oribe store visits and competitive store tours to ensure adherence to visual merchandising guidelines and pinpoint areas for enhancement, experiential opportunities and brand storytelling. Be the primary liaison and authority on Oribe Visual Merchandising, for both internal and external stakeholders, with a steadfast commitment to achieving best in class merchandising excellence.
• Art Direction for all Global Design Assets: Lead the ideation and development of innovative and engaging concepts for marketing campaigns that effectively communicate our brand's narrative and objectives. * Create mood boards, storyboards, and visual references to clearly express the artistic vision to the internal and external creative teams. Direct and oversee photoshoots, guiding the team in areas such as set design, lighting, composition, and model direction to achieve desired outcomes. * Collaborate closely with creative director, photographers, stylists to bring concepts to life through compelling visual imagery, ensuring the cohesive execution of concepts and maintaining the brand's aesthetic standards. *Lead post-production teams to ensure the visual assets meet the intended direction and quality standards. Ensuring a cohesive and unified brand presence by meticulously upholding and enforcing brand guidelines across an array of design materials.* Actualize inventive design strategies to elevate and progress the visual identity of the brand, resulting in an enriched and modernized brand image.

What you will need:

• Bachelor's degree in Fine Art, or related discipline such as Advertising, Graphic Design.
• 8+ years of professional design experience and a track record working with fashion, beauty, and luxury brands.
• Possess exceptional design skills and a meticulous attention to detail.
• Demonstrate outstanding abilities in conceptual design and visual ideation for photography-based marketing campaigns.
• Demonstrate outstanding abilities in luxury visual merchandising with a focus on specialty-multi, department stores and salons.
• Experience with project management, adept at prioritizing tasks and handling multiple projects simultaneously.
• Strong collaboration and communication abilities, enabling effective teamwork across all cross-functional teams.
• Comprehensive mastery of the Adobe Creative Suite, with a particular focus on Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, as well as Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat.
• Adaptable to a dynamic work environment.

What we offer: A friendly and flexible work environment with great compensation packages, benefits package, ongoing development and the opportunity to enhance your skills and deliver tangible results. At Kao your voice will be heard. Your opinion really counts. We believe that change comes from taking opportunities into your own hands, so we value and reward thinking and new ideas.

Hiring Process: Kao embraces the diversity and the individual personalities of its people because we believe it is diversity that makes us strong. This is why we welcome applications from all areas of the global community.

Want to learn more: If you feel you are as unique as our products and want to find out why 33,000 people across the globe opted for a career with us please visit our Americas website (https://www.kao.com/americas/en/).

Kao USA is an equal opportunity employer, including disability/vets.

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