Director, Art & Design

About this role

Who We Are

The Farmer’s Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We’re starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers’ doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer business model, holistic approach to growth, and dynamic culture uniquely position us to shepherd this backwards industry into the future.

To date, The Farmer’s Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

What We Stand For and Where You’ll Come In

The Farmer’s Dog is looking for a Director of Art and Design to lead and evolve our visual identity across every customer touchpoint, from integrated brand campaigns and packaging to social content and physical installations. Reporting directly into our VP, Creative, you’ll manage a team of designers and partner closely with our Creative Director to ensure our brand shows up distinctively and cohesively everywhere it lives. This is a high-impact creative leadership role with the opportunity to shape how millions of dog owners experience TFD.

One Team: We don’t think of ourselves as “Acquisition Marketers”, “Engineers”, “Data Analysts”, or “Product Managers”. Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don’t think departments matter. We’d rather align ourselves to the goals we’re working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER – getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.

We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing: Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren’t tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there’s a better or more impactful way to solve problems.

We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions: We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is. We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention. We answer questions and address problems early and proactively. We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.

We Execute For Impact: We don’t subscribe to “best practices” or “industry KPIs”. We’re uninterested in how we compare to “benchmarks”; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don’t subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles – i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.

We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption : We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, “what’s the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?”. We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don’t expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Lead art and design efforts for everything from integrated 360 brand campaigns to fast-twitch social content to packaging and installations.

• Direct new explorations of look and feel, adapting and evolving our brand guidelines and crafting proprietary, brand-true visual voice in photography, art direction, typography, and other elements of visual expression.

• Manage a team of designers to ensure that our brand is translated into effective, distinctive, and cohesive design systems. Inspire brave new ideas while keeping a constant pulse on consistency and continuity.

• Partner with the Creative Director on TVC, video, OOH, and other major advertising assets, advising on art direction and leading the intersection of graphic elements and typography.

• Be comfortable wearing different hats and navigating different elevations: from strategic creative beacon to diligent, unflappable air traffic controller to devoted mentor to nitty-gritty kerning-checker.

• Work closely with the Brand operations function to help plan resourcing, track bandwidth, create project and production schedules, and maintain oversight on the organizational health of the team.

• Partner with Product Design leadership to ensure all our surfaces feel of one brand.

• Join with stakeholders in other departments throughout the company to meet and exceed our business goals. You’ll immerse yourself in the product, becoming an expert in the unique qualities of our fresh food service, and shepherd creative ideas through the vetting process to co-develop work that serves the business as a whole.

We're Excited About You Because

• You have 10+ years of experience, including 2+ years as a Design Director within an agency and/or in-house team. A portfolio with creative, relevant work for which you were primarily responsible is required.

• You have managed a team of creatives and value mentorship as a crucial element of the job function. You consider the growth and success of your direct reports the greatest signal of your own achievement. You can spot a

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