Interim Chief Executive Officer in London

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.

The role will lead the business through the evolving phases of the appointment: progressively

taking on responsibility during handover; independently holding the senior layer of the

organisation while both senior roles are open; and, in the latter phase of the appointment, re-

establishing clear decision rights and incorporating founder sign-off in the relevant areas without

compromising the business's pace or stability.

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.

They will identify risks and opportunities early, turn insight into decisions, and ensure that plans

across product, stock, channels, and expenditure are commercially rigorous. The Interim CEO will

prepare clear recommendations and bring budgets and forecasts to the Founder for sign-off where appropriate. Trading. Trading

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.

The business operates a lean stock model and the successful candidate will oversee demand

forecasting, regular reordering and disciplined stock availability, balancing commercial

opportunity with appropriate inventory risk. They will work closely with ecommerce, social, and

press to convert demand into smooth, profitable trading and an excellent customer experience,

identifying improvements across fulfilment, retention, data, and process.

A key priority will be to improve commercial performance within the London retail store. The

Interim CEO will also help establish the operational foundations and commercial discipline

necessary to support the planned Miami retail opening in 2028.

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. They will ensure that

shipping, import, export, and logistics arrangements are efficient, cost-effective, and proportionate

to the scale of the business, working alongside the dedicated logistics resource that manages the

day-to-day administrative detail.

This is intentionally not a day-to-day manufacturing-management role. The Product Manager

retains responsibility for sourcing, production, factory timelines, and routine supplier and

manufacturer relationships, including quality control, lead-time management, and commercial

terms. The Design Consultant is focused exclusively on design. The Interim CEO will act as the

senior escalation point only where a material production or supplier issue requires executive

intervention, rather than being drawn into routine sourcing or factory management. The Founder

will retain periodic high-level conversations with key factory leadership.

The role will partner with the Product Manager on critical-path visibility and the downstream

commercial implications of production delivery. Its purpose is to make the collection executable

through accurate costing, intelligent logistics, proportionate escalation, and robust collection

planning—not to duplicate the specialist product and production functions. 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. In

partnership with the Founder, they will help translate the brand's philosophy, manifesto, and

culture into the everyday practices of the company.

The successful candidate will take responsibility for team leadership, workload, prioritisation,

hiring, and people operations throughout the appointment. They will diagnose gaps in capability,

resource, structure, or accountability and make clear recommendations to position the business for

its next stage of growth. This is an emphatically hands-on leadership role: the Interim CEO will be

expected to step into meetings, unblock problems, support departments directly, and improve

systems without retreating behind functional boundaries.

The Interim CEO will partner with the Founder on senior appointments, ensuring that key hires

reflect both the commercial requirements of the business and the distinctive culture of the brand.

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, including those with wholesale partners,

stockists, collaborators, suppliers, and other key stakeholders.

They will translate agreed strategic priorities into clear plans, owners, milestones, and delivery. In

the latter phase of the appointment, the Interim CEO will work closely with the Founder on the

longer-term strategic agenda, ensuring that brand-led partnerships have appropriate founder input

while retaining accountability for the commercial and operational execution needed to realise

them.

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. They will ensure that decisions, responsibilities, and key status information are well

documented, enabling the longer-term leadership team to inherit a more organised, better-

managed, and more commercially disciplined business. 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. The Product Manager and

coordinator layer will report into the role. A full organisation chart will be made available to

shortlisted candidates.

The boundary with creative is both clear and fundamental. The Founder retains responsibility for

brand vision, creative direction, long-term brand strategy, key partnerships, senior hires, and final

sign-off. The Design Consultant owns clothing design and garment-level creative decisions. The

Interim CEO will own the commercial, financial, operational, people, channel, and process

agenda, partnering closely with the creative function to protect both the integrity of the brand and

the business's capacity to deliver it.

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.

This job description reflects the current requirements of the role. It is not exhaustive and may