Creative Lead – Brand & Studio 

Stockport – Hybrid, 3 office days

Up to £60,000 + benefits

If you’re a senior creative leader who’s turned a brand identity into a living, breathing thing across every channel, and you’re ready for a role with real growth potential behind it, this is a genuinely exciting one.

My client is a fast-growing fintech business that’s just had a new brand identity designed by their agency partner. They now need someone to take ownership of that identity – shaping how it shows up everywhere customers meet it – while also leading an existing in-house team of three designers through a genuine shift in how the studio operates.

This is as much a process and leadership role as it is a creative one. You’ll be looking hard at how the team works day to day and figuring out where AI can genuinely help – not as a buzzword, but as a practical way to free up designer time for the work that actually needs a brilliant human behind it. Think: could a well-maintained prompt library, built off the brand guidelines and templates, let marketing self-serve routine assets like emails, so your best designers spend their time on the bigger, higher-impact work instead? That’s the kind of thinking they want in the room.

What you’ll be doing:

• Landing the new identity – taking the brand from initial guidelines into daily reality across web, app, campaigns and every other customer touchpoint, so it feels the same wherever people meet it
• Rethinking how the studio operates – reviewing current ways of working and building smarter processes, so the team can move faster without creative quality slipping
• Making AI genuinely useful – identifying where tools can save real time on repetitive tasks (think prompt libraries for on-brand, templated assets) versus where you need a designer’s judgement, and building the systems that make that split work
• Developing the team – coaching the three designers already in place, helping them grow into the parts of the job that matter most as routine work gets faster
• Performance-led creative – working alongside paid social, digital and email teams to keep creative sharp, using results to spot what’s landing and what needs a rethink
• Owning the customer experience – working with product and digital teams so the brand holds together from first click to last, not just in the ad campaigns

What we’re looking for:

• Serious experience in a senior level Creative role where you’ve had this level of responsibility and ownership for both brand and studio, either agency-side or in-house, with a portfolio proving you can build brands
• Real experience leading a creative team through change – evolving how a studio works, not just what it produces
• Genuine, practical experience using AI creative tools day to day, with clear opinions on where they help and where they don’t
• A commercial head on your shoulders – you can talk results and effectiveness as fluently as you can talk concepts
• Deep fluency in Adobe Creative Suite and Figma
• Fintech or regulated-industry background is nice-to-have, not a dealbreaker – the calibre of your thinking matters more

If that sounds like the kind of change you want to lead, I’d love to hear from you.