Creative Operations Manager

Who we are

Mother Root is the Ginger non‑alcoholic aperitif. We harness the power of apple cider vinegar to serve up a dose of good feelings. Our mission is to redefine what it means to drink well and feel good — with drinks that are complex, delicious and rooted in nature. Fresh from securing three offers on BBC Dragons’ Den, we’re on an exciting growth journey — scaling from a £7m brand today towards £50m+ in the years ahead, with 230% year‑on‑year growth already underway. With our small but mighty team, we’re building one of the UK’s fastest‑growing non‑alcoholic brands, both online and in retail. We’re bold, inclusive and ambitious. We value creativity, curiosity, and collaboration — and we believe work should be joyful, purposeful and full of flavour.

The Role

Run the engine that turns briefs into the creative that sells bottles. Reporting to the Head of Brand and Campaigns, you’ll own how creative gets made: how briefs come in, how they’re prioritised, who works on them, on what timeline, on what budget, against what success measure, and how learnings come back into the next brief. You sit between Growth (who brief the most volume), Brand and Campaigns (who set the standard), and the people who make the work: designers, video and motion editors, photographers, producers, the Creative Strategist, and the Co‑Creative Leads themselves. You own creative throughput and on-time/on-budget delivery as your scorecard. The Co‑Creative Leads own creative quality and brand standards. The Heads of Brand and Growth own brief quality. You’ll own everything in between.

What You’ll Do

• Brief intake & prioritisation
  • Own the single intake process. Every paid, email, organic, web, retail and PR creative request comes through you, in one format, with a clear commercial objective, audience, customer insight, channel logic and success measure.
  • Triage and route briefs to the right team (Brand Creative, Performance Creative, freelance) based on type, urgency, complexity and capacity.
  • Run the weekly prioritisation ritual with the Creative Studio. When briefs conflict, surface the trade‑off and get a decision.
  • Push back on briefs that aren’t ready: every one must have an insight, commercial imperative and priority.
• Performance creative production
  • Own the performance creative pipeline end‑to‑end: paid social, paid search creative variants, display, affiliate and partnership assets.
  • Own the email and lifecycle creative pipeline end‑to‑end: campaign emails, automated flows, transactional creative, SMS where relevant.
  • Own the digital campaign creative pipeline: site banners, landing pages, retargeting suites, Amazon A+ content, marketplace creative.
  • Run the weekly performance‑creative iteration cadence with Performance Creative Lead and the Creative Strategist: concept → asset → ship → read → iterate. This is where you spend most of your time, and where you’re measured hardest.
  • Keep the asset library, naming conventions, and creative tagging tight enough that we can read performance by concept, hook and variant.
• Project sizing & resourcing
  • Size creative projects properly before they kick off: scope, hours, freelance vs in‑house, timeline, budget, dependencies. Designers, video and motion editors, and production teams should never start a project that hasn’t been sized.
  • Plan and run photo and video shoots end‑to‑end alongside Brand Creative Lead and the production team: pre‑production, call sheets, day‑of logistics, post.
  • Manage the freelance roster: designers, photographers, DPs, motion editors, producers, stylists. Keep day rates, availability and quality of work documented.
  • Forecast creative capacity, flag the bottlenecks before they happen.
• Workflow & tools
  • Own the creative workflow in Notion: boards, databases, brief templates, capacity views, status, ownership, due dates. Make it the single source of truth.
  • Set up and maintain the supporting stack: Frame.io or similar for video review, Figma for design review, Dropbox / Google Drive for assets, project tracking in Notion (or whatever ships work fastest).
  • Run regular working‑system reviews. What’s slow, what’s broken, what’s missing. Ship improvements quarterly.
• Budget & vendors
  • Own the creative production budget alongside the Head of Brand and Campaigns. Forecast, track actuals, flag variances early.
  • Manage day‑to‑day vendor relationships: freelance creatives, production houses, photography studios, post houses.
  • Take ongoing brand tracker vendor management as part of your remit (Latana, Tracksuit, or Vypr; TBD by Head of Brand and Campaigns). Strategy stays with them; operations sit with you.

What You’ll Bring

• A creative operator who has lived in performance creative. You’ve sat next to a performance team and shipped paid social, email, and digital campaign creative at volume. You know what “another 15 variants by Thursday” actually means.
• Fluent in workflow tools. Particularly Notion (databases, views, automations, templates), Claude and Slack automations. If you can power workflows with AI, even better.
• Brilliant at sizing creative work. You can scope a project with designers, video and motion editors, and production teams before it kicks off. You’ve sat in pre‑pro and on photo shoots, so you know what a realistic call sheet looks like.
• A prioritisation engine. You can hold five conflicting briefs in your head, surface the trade‑offs in one sentence, and get a clean decision out of two strong creative leads.
• Operationally precise. Budgets reconcile. Invoices get paid. Day rates are documented. Freelancers come back because you’re a pleasure to work with.

You’ll Thrive Here If You

• Real creative leadership working with you. You'll work with, and learn from two of the best creative leads in the category.
• Performance creative at scale. If you love the rhythm of ship‑test‑iterate‑ship, this is the role. Paid social, email and digital are where most of our creative volume lives.
• Influence beyond the title. You sit across the whole marketing function. You’ll work daily with the CMO, both Heads, and the Founder.
• Category momentum. Non‑alc is exploding. We’ve raised £1.1M, appeared on Dragons’ Den, grown sales 2,000% post‑air, and just landed Waitrose, Ocado, Sainsbury’s and Selfridges.
• Human mission. You’re helping people connect. Joyful moderation, not sober identity. A brand worth working on.

Benefits & Perks

• Share Options Programme
• Hybrid working: 3 x a week in office (Mon, Tues, Thurs) & 2 from home
• Annual Leave: 25 days per year
• Summer Hours: Early finish Fridays (June–August)
• Work From Anywhere: Up to 2 weeks per year
• Pension: 5% matched contribution
• Cycle Scheme: Bike or Lime/Forest Pass
• Personal Development: £300 annual allowance for approved training
• Wellbeing Support: Access to Spill app & Heka allowance (£40/month) + birthday/work anniversary boosts
• Annual Team Trip: Gastronomical & wellbeing‑focused team away trip
• Parental Leave: Competitive maternity/paternity package
• Lots of free Mother Root