PERFORMANCE CREATIVE STRATEGIST in Grays

Hunter & Gather exists to help people eat, feel, and look better through evidence-backed nutrition. We create natural supplements and nutrient-rich foods that put back what modern life takes out. Feeling your best should come naturally. Everything we make starts with ingredients your body recognises, always free from seed oils, refined sugar and gluten. Ancestrally inspired, evidence-backed, made for modern life. Around the products sits a warm, welcoming community and a wealth of accessible education, so people can reclaim their right to live well, one informed choice at a time. We're an award-winning UK wellness brand in an exciting phase of development, with growth across the team, product range and sales channels.

KEY DETAILS

• Full time (37.5 hours per week plus 1 hour unpaid lunch break)
• Hybrid (minimum 3 days per week in office - normally Monday, Wednesday and one other) as well as shoot days on location.
• Office at RM16 6EW - Parking available and C2C station from London 1 minute walk from office
• 33 days leave (inc. bank holidays) – pro rata for part-time
• Flexi start time (Core business hours 10-4)
• Discretionary up to 30% bonus (if eligible)

WHAT IS THE ROLE?

Creative is the single biggest lever we have in paid social. This role owns it. You will own the creative engine behind Hunter & Gather's paid media: understanding what our customers actually care about, turning it into distinctive ideas, spotting which of those ideas is working early, then iterating and scaling it while keeping a steady supply of genuinely different concepts in test. You are accountable for creative performance, not asset volume. Three things matter most here: knowing how to spot and iterate a winning ad, running a roadmap that keeps producing them, and scaling performance through creative diversity and distinctive concepting rather than more of the same. Your highest-value contribution is deciding what we should make, why we should make it and what we should learn from it. You should be capable of getting a simple idea into test yourself when speed matters, but you are not expected to become the production bottleneck. You will brief and direct our designer, content creator, brand team, agency partners and creator community, working alongside our media buyers and drawing on our nutrition and CX teams for customer insight. We are an AI-forward business. We expect you to build AI into research, synthesis and concepting, and to turn what works into process the wider team can pick up.

WHAT THIS ROLE DOES NOT OWN

• Media buying and budget allocation, which sits with paid media and our agency partners
• Brand-led studio and campaign shoots, which sit with brand. You feed performance requirements into them
• The organic social calendar. You will supply it with winning creative, but it is not yours to run

ESSENTIAL

• 3+ years developing performance creative for DTC or ecommerce brands, in-house or agency side. You do not need to have held this exact job title before
• Commercial literacy: understands CAC, CPA, CVR, ROAS, MER and contribution margin, and understands the difference between creative that attracts attention and creative that drives profitable growth
• A portfolio or showreel of paid social ads you concepted, with the results they delivered. Applications without a portfolio may not be considered
• Judgement: you can spot a winning ad early and know what to do next with it, which variable to isolate, when to scale and when to kill
• Fluent in creative-level reporting in Meta Ads Manager and TikTok Ads Manager: hook rate, hold rate, CTR, CVR, CPA and ROAS
• Track record of running a creative testing roadmap and keeping it supplied with genuinely different angles, formats and concepts rather than variants of one idea
• Experience managing a community of creators: sourcing them, briefing them well, managing their output and holding a consistent quality bar
• Able to get an idea into a testable asset yourself. You should be comfortable shooting simple video and building basic statics, with our design and video editing support there for anything that needs finishing properly
• Strong direct-response writing, and briefs that someone else can execute without a follow-up meeting
• Already using AI in your own workflow for research, synthesis and concepting

DESIRABLE

• Stronger editing or design craft (Premiere Pro, CapCut, Figma) if you would rather make more of the work yourself
• Genuine interest in an ancestrally influenced lifestyle the wider health and wellness space
• Experience in food, supplements or wellness, including the advertising claims rules that come with it
• Experience with creative analytics tools such as Motion, Foreplay or Atria
• Experience creating assets for Amazon or YouTube
• Full clean driving licence, useful for shoot days and location work

KEY ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Customer and market insight: Live in the raw material every week: reviews, ad comments, CX tickets, surveys, community groups and competitor ad libraries. Read the one-star reviews as closely as the five-star ones. Maintain living customer personas: who buys us, why they switch, what holds them back and the language they use. Map our category entry points, the moments, meals and routines when someone reaches for what we sell, and turn them into testable angles.
• Concepting and creative diversity: Generate original, ownable ideas for Hunter & Gather rather than reskinning what the category already runs. Keep a deliberate spread across angle, format, hook style and talent type so performance never rests on one asset. Treat each platform on its own terms. Meta, TikTok and YouTube reward different things and should not be fed the same asset resized. Build for every stage of the funnel: Build creative across the customer journey, from cold acquisition through cross-sell, retention and win-back, in partnership with the owners of Ecommerce, CRM and Retention.
• Roadmap, testing and scaling winners: Own a rolling creative roadmap: what is being tested, why, in what order, and what decision each test informs. Forecast what paid media needs each month and make sure the volume and mix arrive on time, from brand, agency, freelance or creator sources. Read performance early and call winners, iterations and kills with conviction. Break winners into their component parts and rework them into new variants and concepts. Stay ahead of fatigue. By the time a winner starts to decline you should already have the next angles briefed.
• Getting the work made: Write the briefs: hooks, scripts, shot lists, references and success criteria, clear enough to execute without hand-holding. Shoot, cut or design your own assets where speed matters, and use our design and editing support for anything that needs finishing to a higher standard. Feed performance requirements into brand-led shoots so hooks, angles and formats are captured while the camera is out. Keep claims compliant with ASA/CAP and platform policy, and keep every asset inside brand guidelines. Performance and brand are not in opposition here. Own the performance creative direction for creators used in paid acquisition: identifying the right creator profile for a concept, developing briefs and scripts, reviewing creative output, feeding back performance learnings and determining what should be made next.
• Reporting and compounding learning: Run a weekly creative review with media buyers and agency partners, and a monthly report that states the learnings plainly and sets the next cycle's direction. Report on pipeline health alongside performance (throughput, hit rate, on-time delivery) so we can see whether ideas or the engine is the constraint. Maintain a creative playbook of the angles, hooks and formats that work for us, so wins compound instead of walking out of the door. Push winning creative and its learnings out to organic social, email, on-site and Amazon.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• First 30 days: you know our customers, products and existing creative inside out, with a documented view of what has worked, what has not and why.
• First 90 days: a live roadmap and testing plan, an active creator roster delivering to brief, and a weekly creative review the growth team relies on.
• First 6 to 12 months: creative is a reliable growth lever rather than a lottery. Creative-level performance is measurably better, a wider spread of concepts is carrying it, and you can trace winning ads back to the insight that sparked them.