Senior Lead Designer in Slough

This is a rare opportunity to step into a senior creative leadership role at one of Europe’s most distinctive independent beauty brands. As Senior Lead Designer at ZOEVA, you will lead the conceptualisation, development, and execution of visual assets across both physical and digital platforms — working in close, day-to-day partnership with our founder and Creative Director to define and evolve the visual language of the brand.

You will be responsible for driving creative campaign direction, maintaining brand identity at the highest level, and overseeing design projects from initial brief through to final production. This is not a purely executional role: we expect you to originate ideas, challenge convention, and set the creative standard — whilst being hands-on and lead-by-example when pace demands it.

We are looking for someone with deep roots in premium beauty or luxury lifestyle, expert command of digital and campaign design, and a progressive attitude toward how AI tools are reshaping the way great creative teams work. If you are someone who sees AI as a force multiplier for ideas rather than a shortcut, you will find a genuinely exciting environment here.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

• Creative Direction & Concepting
  • Translate seasonal marketing strategies and brand vision into compelling, high-impact digital and physical marketing materials.
  • Drive the creative ideation process for campaigns, product launches, and seasonal moments - from concept through to final delivery.
  • Set and maintain a high creative bar across all outputs, with a strong point of view on typography, layout, and visual storytelling.
  • Stay ahead of aesthetic and cultural trends in beauty and lifestyle, ensuring ZOEVA’s creative remains fresh, distinctive, and ahead of the market.
• Brand Execution & Identity
  • Own and enforce design guidelines and visual systems to ensure consistent brand representation across all touchpoints: website, social media, packaging, retail, and advertising.
  • Champion the ZOEVA visual identity as the brand scales — ensuring guidelines remain coherent, relevant, and inspiring for the whole team.
  • Partner with key stakeholders to thoughtfully evolve brand guidelines over time, maintaining integrity whilst enabling creative growth.
  • Oversee the quality and consistency of all creative output across the team, providing clear direction and meaningful feedback.
• Digital & Campaign Design
  • Lead design and production of assets for e-commerce, digital marketing campaigns (email, paid social, performance creative), and organic social channels.
  • Oversee the production of campaign assets across multiple ZOEVA markets, ensuring both quality and efficiency at scale.
  • Collaborate with the performance marketing team to ensure creative is designed with both brand integrity and conversion in mind.
  • Adapt quickly to algorithmic and platform-specific changes across Social platforms - translating these into actionable creative direction for the team.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Partner closely with copywriting, e-commerce, CRM, and creative operations teams to ensure seamless campaign execution from brief to live.
  • Work with the Product Marketing Manager to provide creative input on branded shoots, ensuring raw content covers the full creative needs of the business.
  • Manage external creative partners and freelancers, maintaining quality and consistency of output.
  • Present creative concepts and campaign work to senior stakeholders with clarity and conviction.
• AI-Augmented Creative Workflows
  • Champion the integration of AI design tools, such as Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and equivalent technologies. Helping to accelerate ideation, generate concepts at scale, and prototype faster without compromising quality.
  • Establish best-practice AI workflows within the creative team, building repeatable processes that increase output and free resource for higher-value, more considered work.
  • Use AI-assisted tools for rapid mood-boarding, concept generation, and asset variation to bring ideas to life and into testing faster.
  • Stay current with developments in generative design and proactively identify tools and techniques that could benefit ZOEVA.
• Team Development & Mentorship
  • Manage, mentor, and develop the creative team - fostering a high-performance, collaborative, and creatively ambitious culture.
  • Support the growth of junior team members through structured feedback, guidance, and creative coaching.
  • Build effective working relationships across marketing, CRM, product development, and external agencies.

SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS

Essential

• 4–7+ years of dedicated graphic design experience, gained in-house at a premium beauty, fashion, or lifestyle brand.
• Exceptional portfolio demonstrating outstanding typography, layout, and visual storytelling across digital and physical formats.
• Expert-level proficiency across the Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign) and Figma.
• Deep understanding of digital design across e-commerce, paid social, email, and web — with a genuine sense of how design drives performance and conversion.
• Proven ability to manage multiple fast-paced projects concurrently, adapting quickly to changing priorities and market conditions.
• Demonstrated creative leadership — experience directing, mentoring, and elevating the work of a creative team.
• Experience working in close collaboration with a founder, Creative Director, or senior creative stakeholder.
• A distinctive creative voice: the confidence to originate ideas, push concepts further, and hold the standard under pressure.
• Clear and confident communicator, able to articulate creative decisions to both creative and non-creative audiences.

Desirable

• Hands-on experience with AI design and image-generation tools.
• Experience building, evolving, or codifying a brand’s visual identity and design guidelines.
• Background working across European or international markets with multi-market campaign production.
• Understanding of print production, packaging design, and retail/event creative.
• Familiarity with motion design, animation, or video post-production workflows.

Zoeva is a German company and due to the fact there is no UK legal entity all employees in the Marketing department are employed on a Freelance basis. However, employment is viewed on a long-term basis and we are looking for people to become part of the team and remain with us for the long term.