Creative Director

About the role

We are seeking a strategic, transformational Creative Director to lead and evolve a global creative organization supporting a complex portfolio of products, brands, and customer audiences. This is a senior leadership role responsible for shaping creative strategy, modernizing processes, developing talent, and elevating the creative function from a production-focused service model to a highly valued strategic business partner. The ideal candidate brings a unique combination of executive-level creative leadership, digital transformation expertise, operational excellence, and hands-on creative credibility. While this leader will not be expected to execute day-to-day design work, they must be capable of guiding and critiquing creative output, mentoring teams, and driving creative excellence across both digital and traditional marketing channels. This role will play a key part in an ongoing brand evolution initiative, partnering closely with internal brand leadership and external consultants to strengthen brand expression, improve customer engagement, and create scalable content solutions across global markets.

Details: Location: Hybrid - onsite in Rogers, MN 4 days a week. Travel: Approximately 10% domestic and international travel. Work Authorization: Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship requirements. Team Structure: Oversight of a global creative organization totaling approximately 17 team members.

Responsibilities

• Lead the organization's global creative function, setting the vision, strategy, and priorities across brand, content, digital, and traditional marketing channels.
• Serve as a strategic partner to marketing and business leaders, translating business objectives into creative solutions that drive engagement, growth, and customer experience.
• Partner with brand leadership and external consultants to support the ongoing evolution of the brand and ensure consistent execution across all customer touchpoints.
• Lead and develop a global creative organization, including 3 direct reports and approximately 17 total team members.
• Drive the modernization of creative capabilities, balancing digital innovation, emerging technologies, and AI-enabled workflows with established marketing channels and business needs.
• Evaluate and improve creative processes, workflows, team structure, and resource allocation to increase effectiveness, scalability, and business impact.
• Provide strategic creative direction and quality oversight across campaigns, content, sales enablement materials, events, packaging, web, video, and digital experiences.
• Build strong relationships across a matrixed organization, influencing stakeholders and aligning teams around creative priorities and brand standards.
• Lead teams through organizational change, helping modernize capabilities while successfully navigating established processes and long-standing ways of working.
• Manage external creative partners and agency relationships as needed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Graphic Design, Communications, Visual Arts, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in creative, brand, content, design, or marketing leadership roles, including experience leading people leaders and creative teams.
• MUST have experience managing a large creative team.
• Proven experience developing creative strategies that drive business results within complex, matrixed organizations.
• Experience leading organizational change, improving processes, and building high-performing teams.
• Strong understanding of both digital and traditional marketing channels, including content, web, social, sales enablement, events, packaging, and print.
• Experience supporting both B2B and B2B2C audiences.
• Exceptional stakeholder management, communication, and influencing skills.
• Strong business acumen with the ability to connect creative initiatives to business objectives.

Qualifications

• Experience leading creative transformation or modernization initiatives.
• Experience supporting global brands and geographically distributed teams.
• Experience partnering on brand evolution, refresh, or repositioning efforts.
• Experience implementing technology, automation, or AI-enabled creative workflows.
• Experience managing agency and external creative partners.
• Industrial, manufacturing, or other complex product-focused industry experience is a plus.

Pay

Compensation: $111,100 - $180,000 base salary, depending on experience, skills, and location.