Head of Partnerships & Influencers in Manchester

About Nero

Nero is a premium men's natural-fibre activewear brand. We're building a brand on a simple thesis: performance shouldn't come at the cost of synthetic plastics against your skin. We're now scaling our product range and our brand presence, and partnerships is one of our biggest untapped levers.

The Opportunity

This is a founding role. Right now, our influencer, creator, and VIP relationships are run reactively and inconsistently. We meet brilliant people and lose touch, we gift sporadically, and we haven't built the systematic creator engine that a brand our size should have. You'll own all of it and build it from the ground up. You'll be the person who turns scattered relationships into a compounding asset.

What You'll Own

• Performance & accountability
  • Own clear revenue and brand-growth targets tied to all partnership and influencer activity.
  • Track spend, ROI, and contribution by creator, campaign, and channel; we're a bootstrapped, profitable brand, and this function needs to make money, not burn it.
  • Report on what's working, kill what isn't, and reinvest in what scales.
  • Build the affiliate & creator program from scratch.
  • Source, sign, and manage creators and influencers across all social channels.
  • Build a commission-driven affiliate engine: negotiate deals, manage contracts, and own the affiliate platform end-to-end (onboarding, tracking, commissions, payouts).
  • Optimise performance with new partnership structures, incentives, and perks.
  • Source and onboard the right creators for paid social whitelisting and a steady pipeline of UGC/ad creative on a regular cadence, not one-off posts.
  • Partner closely with our paid and creative teams to ensure creator content actually converts, and manage usage rights for everything we run in paid and organic.
• Influencer partnerships & relationship-building
  • Identify, pitch, and build genuine long-term relationships with influencers who match our ICP (founders, athletes, men's health voices).
  • Move us beyond transactional one-offs into ongoing ambassador-style partnerships.
  • Be the relationship memory of the business, nurture connections with the interesting, high-value people we meet and would otherwise forget.
  • Run a proper gifting & VIP program.
  • Build and operate a structured gifting program end-to-end, coordinating with fulfilment for smooth logistics.
  • Manage VIP customer relationships, flagging and looking after our highest-spend customers with exclusive product and genuine personal touch.
  • Drive pre-launch seeding: get product into the right hands early to generate content and build hype ahead of every drop.
• Brand & business partnerships
  • Identify and land meaningful collaborations with aligned brands and notable people.
  • Build a partnerships pipeline that raises Nero's profile and reaches new audiences.

You Might Be a Fit If You

• Have built (not just managed) an influencer, creator, or partnerships program at a DTC/consumer brand, ideally one that scaled.
• Understand paid social and whitelisting well enough to source creators who produce content that performs.
• Are a natural relationship-builder; people remember you, and you remember them.
• Are highly proficient with AI tools and use them daily; you work with Claude (or similar) as a default part of your workflow to research creators, draft outreach at scale, and organise relationships.
• Have taste and discretion that fits a premium brand; you can tell the difference between a creator who looks right and one who is right.
• Operate with founder-level ownership and move fast.
• Bonus: experience in activewear, fashion, men's health/wellness, or luxury; an existing network of creators and contacts.

Why Nero

• Founding ownership of an entire function, with real budget and autonomy.
• A category we genuinely believe is the future of activewear.
• A profitable, fast-growing brand with ambitions to build something enduring.
• Direct line to the founder and a seat at the table on brand strategy.