Interim Chief Executive Officer

Location: London, with a hybrid working pattern and a meaningful on-site presence at the studio.

Term: Fixed-term interim appointment for a minimum of 12 months.

Time commitment: Three days per week initially, increasing to full-time from around October 2026.

Reporting line: Founder & Creative Director. The successful candidate will work closely with the Head of Business, Operations & Strategy throughout the handover.

Start: As soon as possible, ideally allowing for a considered and structured handover before both senior roles become open.

The Company: Clio Peppiatt is a London-based luxury fashion house distinguished by its intricate embellishment, embroidery, and singular, hand-crafted point of view. The business combines a powerful creative signature with a lean, highly capable team and an increasingly direct relationship with its global customer. The company is entering an important period of transition and opportunity. Both the Founder & Creative Director role and the Head of Business, Operations & Strategy role will be open during the appointment. In response, Clio Peppiatt is seeking an exceptional interim leader to provide continuity, commercial rigour, and decisive stewardship across the business.

This is not a conventional interim brief. It is a rare opportunity for an accomplished operator to assume genuine enterprise-wide responsibility within an entrepreneurial luxury brand, protecting what makes the business distinctive while strengthening the commercial and operational foundations required for its next chapter.

The Mandate: The Interim Chief Executive Officer will hold the operational, commercial, financial, and organisational centre of the business throughout the interim appointment. The role will be responsible for ensuring that the company continues to trade, deliver, grow, and make sound decisions with pace and discipline, while the Design Consultant leads clothing design and garment-level creative decisions.

The mandate will evolve deliberately across the appointment. In the first phase, the successful candidate will immerse themselves in the business and partner closely with the Head of Business, Operations & Strategy, absorbing context, building relationships, and establishing a robust operating cadence. The critical period will follow, when both senior roles are open and the Interim CEO becomes the principal senior point of contact for the business. In the latter phase of the appointment, the mandate will shift towards stabilisation, clear founder decision-making where appropriate, and a thoughtful hand-back of responsibilities.

The successful candidate will bring the intellectual range and personal maturity to translate creative ambition into commercially viable, on-time, on-margin execution. This is a build-and-lead brief for an individual who is as comfortable setting direction as they are stepping into the detail, removing obstacles, and making the business work better every day.

Principal Accountabilities

• Enterprise Leadership & Operating Cadence: The Interim CEO will act as the senior business leader and central decision-maker across the company’s commercial and operational functions. They will establish a clear operating rhythm, set priorities, chair the appropriate leadership forums, and ensure that decisions translate into effective execution. They will provide a calm, pragmatic point of escalation for material issues, maintain momentum through a period of leadership transition, and create the clarity and accountability required for a lean organisation to perform at its best.
• Commercial Performance, Finance & Forecasting: The successful candidate will be accountable for commercial performance across the business and will bring clear financial discipline to the company’s decision-making. They will lead the budget process and maintain close oversight of cashflow, financial reporting, forecasting, margins, cost control, and profitability, working in partnership with the finance team and external advisers to ensure that management information is timely, actionable, and credible.
• Consumer Channels & Retail Development: The role will lead the commercial operating performance of Clio Peppiatt across physical retail, wholesale, and direct-to-consumer ecommerce. The Interim CEO will chair the weekly trade meeting, bringing together ecommerce, retail, wholesale, customer experience, returns, marketing, and other relevant functions to ensure that stock, fulfilment, customer experience, and trading priorities are aligned and actively managed.
• Product, Costing & Logistics: The Interim CEO will provide commercial oversight of costing, logistics, and collection-level delivery. They will be close to collection timelines insofar as these affect launches, retail-partner commitments, stock availability, margin, and the wider commercial plan.
• People, Culture & Organisation: The Interim CEO will lead and develop a young, high-potential team through a significant period of change. They will set a calm, direct, and collaborative leadership tone; sustain morale and performance; coach and develop individuals; and make difficult decisions where required.
• Strategy, Partnerships & Business Development: The successful candidate will carry the company’s business-development and strategic agenda while the two senior roles are open. They will maintain momentum across live initiatives, make the decisions necessary to protect the business’s trajectory, and preserve the external relationships that matter to commercial and operational continuity.
• Systems, Reporting & Continuity: The role will strengthen the operating infrastructure of the company: its systems, reporting, processes, and accountability mechanisms. The successful candidate will introduce meaningful, low-risk improvements where appropriate, while protecting business continuity in a fast-moving environment.
• Governance & Key Interfaces: During the appointment, the Interim CEO will become the senior point of contact for a lean, cross-functional team spanning product, ecommerce, logistics and wholesale, customer experience, press and communications, social, accounts, and studio/EA support.

Candidate Profile: The ideal candidate will have already led a founder-led luxury consumer business through comparable complexity. They may have held a CEO, COO, Managing Director, Operations Director, or similarly broad senior business role, but they will have been accountable for commercial performance as well as operational execution. Prior experience of senior interim or transition leadership is strongly valued.

They will possess sophisticated commercial and financial judgement, with demonstrable command of cashflow, budgeting, forecasting, margins, trading, physical retail, ecommerce, wholesale, and demand planning. They will understand how to build retail operations and systems, operate effectively within a lean and resourceful organisation, and balance growth ambition with financial discipline.

Equally important will be their leadership style. The successful candidate will be an exceptional people leader—able to coach, develop, challenge, and support a relatively young team—and will bring the emotional intelligence to work closely and constructively alongside a creative founder without blurring accountability. They will be calm, pragmatic, low ego, highly organised, commercial, decisive, collaborative, and comfortable with ambiguity.

Above all, this appointment calls for a hands-on business builder. The successful candidate will enjoy solving problems personally, improving the way a business operates, and creating momentum through clear priorities and thoughtful execution. They will be available to start as soon as possible and able to commit to the fixed-term appointment, initially at three days per week and increasing to full-time around October 2026.

Measures of Success: At the conclusion of the interim period, the business will have traded and delivered seamlessly through a period in which its two most senior roles were open. Collections, launches, retail-partner commitments, and commercial trading will have remained on track and on margin. The London retail operation will be performing more strongly, and the company will have clearer operational foundations for future retail expansion.

The business will emerge with better reporting, stronger financial discipline, clearer accountability, and more effective processes. Its team will feel supported, empowered, and well led, with a more confident operating culture and a clearer understanding of priorities. The longer-term leadership team will inherit a stable, better-documented, and more commercially rigorous company, positioned to move decisively into its next phase of growth.