Associate Creative Director - Luxury Fashion

Al Tayer Insignia | Associate Creative Director – Bloomingdale’s II Harvey Nichols II Areej

About Us

As a leader in luxury retail in the Middle East, Al Tayer Group's retail division, Al Tayer Insignia, hosts a portfolio of some of the world’s best luxury brands in the fashion, jewellery, home, and department store categories. Complementing its position in luxury retail, Al Tayer Insignia has also built new frontiers in lifestyle retail, representing leading brands in the Beauty, Home, Fashion and Hospitality sectors. Our brands include Bloomingdales, Harvey Nichols, Armani and newly added Gym Shark and The White Company, to name just a few!

About The Role

The Associate Creative Director is the driving force and creative ambassador behind our brands, responsible for building and delivering a 360 creative strategy and imagery for our seasonal, brand and BAU campaigns across our various platforms (store, email, banners, media, social media, e-comm), focusing on the various segments (women’s, men’s, kid’s, accessories, home, beauty) of our business. The Associate Creative Director will operate with a solid grasp of brand aesthetics and work to elevate and evolve the brand aesthetic with the creation of compelling campaigns season after season.

The Associate Creative Director will liaise with key stakeholders (content, marketing, buying, commercial) and translate commercial and brand strategies into engaging stories and see projects through the development and design phase to the final campaign imagery/videos, working with external suppliers and internal production teams.

The Associate Creative Director will facilitate complex conversations between these departments, and varying levels of management and support a team of Art Directors, Producers, and Stylists with guidance and encouragement.

This role requires a highly creative and conceptual person, with strong communication skills, excellent presentation skills and a very strong fashion aspirational visual focus balanced with business acumen and understanding the commercial focuses of the business to drive sales. A styling background is valuable, the success in this role also requires some foundation in visual design and narrative thinking, specifically the ability to shape and present campaign concepts through high-impact creative decks and visual storytelling. Applicants must be confident in translating brand ideas into polished, multi-channel visuals that clearly communicate the creative strategy.

In addition, this role requires the budget management in line with the production team, ensuring we are thinking outside the box to maximize the budgets.

What You’ll Be Doing

• 
  Manage a team of seven, across Art Directors and brand stylists
• Acts as lead in creative development, and art direction of campaign collateral
• Work with internal peers across production, content and design that function as in house agency by developing brand style guides and seasonal campaigns.
• Ensures high standard of visual execution across all media and campaigns and developing visual standards that honor each brand DNA and customer affinity.
• Partners and collaborates with internal and external teams to understand business objectives and create compelling solution based creative that drives the brand strategy
• Define and implement creative brand strategies according to business needs for each season.
• Oversee creative visuals/mood board creation with a strong ability to articulate the creative vision in a way that is easily understood and engaging whilst evolving the fashion direction to ensure that our brands remain at the forefront of customers mind and focus.
• Oversee the creative shoot concepts with brand consistency across all touch-points, ensuring that these meet key business and departmental KPIs.
• Work closely with the Content team to understand asset needs across our various platforms.
• Work with external brands on key brand exposures and brand partnerships, bringing these to the customer in the form of creative imagery and video.
• Ensure a regional approach to all creatives with a focus on localization, understanding cultural differences and sensitivities.
• Manage creative department, ensuring on-time delivery and overall quality of execution in line with brand standards
• Define brand art direction guides; review and implement updates throughout the year to ensure it is up to date and evolving.
• Align with the Content and Marketing teams for performance insight feedback on imagery/campaigns.
• Target and KPI setting based on business requirements
• Support and mentor members of the creative team to ensure growth and development.
• Provide constructive feedback to the team to ensure that the team remains motivated and passionate about executing the creative brand strategy
• Manage stakeholders on a regular basis, ensuring alignment on campaign directions

About You

• 
  Minimum 7+ years of relevant work experience in driving and producing creative content in a luxury Fashion or luxury retail environment
• Strong background in visual storytelling and experience in developing brand decks, presentations, and creative concept boards.
• Demonstrated ability to translate a campaign idea into both high-level strategy and detailed adaption for cross channel execution.
• Proficiency in layout and presentation tools (e.g., Keynote, Illustrator or similar).
• Comfortable both conceptualizing and reviewing creative, styling, and photography, and articulating the direction across channels using visual mock-up templates supplied by the design team.
• Experience applying design thinking to solve creative challenges and communicate ideas visually across campaign lifecycles.
• Impeccable Creative eye for brand vision and ability to lead creative teams
• Strategic content development
• Strong understanding of luxury brand & beauty market
• Ability to develop and drive content using data metrics and customer behavior
• Navigate and develop strong relationships with other departments
• On time / on budget project delivery