Design Manager - Brand & Performance

Reports To: Content Director

Location: Milwaukee, WI (On-site)

*Candidate will be required to work on-site 3-4 days per week

Employment Type: Full-Time, Salaried, Exempt 

About Wantable  

At Wantable, we’re redefining retail through personalization. Our membership-based model and proprietary technology empower us to curate products that help customers discover confidence and joy through style. 

As a data-driven fashion company, we combine human intuition with algorithmic intelligence to  deliver personalized assortments – balancing creativity, analytics, and operational precision. 

We're seeking a hands-on Design Manager - Brand & Performance to create high-performing, high-volume creative that drives measurable business results while strengthening the Wantable brand. This is a player-coach opportunity for a design leader who loves developing people but still wants to be deeply involved in synthesizing and creating the final product.

About The Role

As Design Manager - Brand & Performance, you'll lead and develop a small team of designers while remaining hands-on across paid media, email, web, social, print, and integrated campaigns. You'll partner closely with Growth, Marketing, Lifecycle, Creative, and Studio teams to turn business objectives, customer insights, and performance data into compelling creative.

You'll use experimentation, scalable systems, automation, and AI to help the team move faster and continuously improve its work. Success means delivering creative that earns attention, drives action, strengthens our brand, and produces measurable results.

What You'll Do

Lead & Develop the Design Team

• Lead, coach, and develop 2–3 designers, setting clear expectations for creative quality, speed, ownership, collaboration, and results.
• Provide actionable creative direction and feedback while empowering designers to make decisions and work autonomously.
• Prioritize and delegate effectively across competing business needs while staying close enough to the work to maintain quality and consistency.
• Remain deeply hands-on, personally concepting and producing priority creative alongside the team.
• Build your team's understanding of performance marketing, customer behavior, experimentation, and business outcomes.

Create High-Performing Brand & Performance Creative

• Concept and execute creative across paid advertising, email and lifecycle marketing, web and landing pages, social, print, direct mail, and other customer touchpoints.
• Translate business objectives and customer needs into compelling concepts and cohesive visual systems.
• Create and test variations across hooks, messaging, layouts, imagery, formats, and calls to action.
• Maintain Wantable's visual standards while adapting creative for different channels, audiences, objectives, and stages of the customer journey.
• Determine when an opportunity calls for an original concept versus a thoughtful iteration of something already proven to work.

Use Data to Make Creative Better

• Partner with Growth, Lifecycle, and Marketing to understand creative performance and determine what to test next.
• Use metrics including click-through rate, conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, cost per order, revenue, revenue per send, engagement, and testing results to inform creative decisions.
• Recognize patterns in winning creative and turn those insights into repeatable templates, frameworks, and future concepts.
• Iterate quickly based on customer behavior, channel feedback, and measurable results.
• Bring forward proactive creative testing opportunities rather than waiting for assignments.

Concept, Research & Create

• Research ecommerce, fashion, retail, advertising, creator culture, competitors, and broader trends to uncover relevant creative opportunities.
• Turn a business objective or loose brief into a clear creative direction.
• Develop and refine short-form marketing copy, including headlines, hooks, calls to action, and promotional messaging.
• Partner with Creative and the Photo Studio on campaign concepts, visual references, asset planning, photo/video shoots, and content creation when needed.
• Design through the lens of Wantable's customer, considering what will capture attention, communicate clearly, overcome objections, and inspire action.

Build Faster, Smarter Creative Systems

• Manage a high volume of concurrent creative priorities while maintaining quality, accuracy, and brand consistency.
• Build templates, processes, workflows, and systems that increase the team's speed and creative capacity.
• Know when additional exploration will materially improve the outcome—and when the work simply needs to ship.
• Own work from initial concept through production, handoff, performance learning, and iteration.
• Partner with Marketing and Growth leadership to focus creative resources on the highest-impact opportunities.

Work AI-Natively

• Use AI and automation to accelerate creative research, ideation, messaging development, prototyping, iteration, image editing, and production.
• Identify repetitive production activities that can be streamlined through automation, templates, or improved systems.
• Explore emerging creative tools and determine where they can meaningfully improve team capabilities and output.
• Apply strong human judgment to AI-supported work, ensuring final creative meets Wantable's standards for quality, accuracy, customer relevance, brand integrity, and craftsmanship.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of professional design experience, ideally within ecommerce, DTC, retail, fashion, advertising, or another high-output consumer environment.
• Experience directly managing and developing designers.
• A standout portfolio demonstrating excellent design judgment and versatility across multiple customer-facing channels.
• Strong paid-social and performance-creative experience, including the ability to use performance insights to improve creative.
• Experience with email/lifecycle marketing, landing pages, ecommerce web experiences, and professional print materials.
• Experience contributing to or leading photo/video shoots, including concept development, shot planning, and on-set creative direction.
• Exceptional typography, hierarchy, composition, layout, and visual storytelling skills.
• Advanced proficiency with Adobe Creative Suite and Figma.
• Experience with video, motion, or lightweight content-creation tools.
• Understanding of performance marketing and the metrics used to evaluate creative effectiveness.
• Comfort using and experimenting with AI-powered creative tools and workflows.
• Ability to write and refine effective short-form marketing messaging.
• Strong communication, prioritization, organization, and time-management skills.
• High ownership, resourcefulness, sound judgment, adaptability, and attention to detail.
• Ability to receive direct feedback, iterate quickly, and make decisions without unnecessary layers of approval.
• Must live in the Milwaukee area or be willing to relocate and work in person at Wantable's Milwaukee headquarters and/or Photo Studio 3–4 days per week.

Nice To Have

• Working knowledge of Apple technology.
• Familiarity with Google products (Drive, Gmail and Docs).
• Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design, Digital Media, or a related field. An exceptional portfolio and directly relevant experience matter more than pedigree.
• Experience within fashion, ecommerce, DTC, retail, or another performance-oriented consumer brand.
• Experience translating one campaign or creative idea across paid media, email, web, social, and physical touchpoints.
• Experience developing creative that has been tested and iterated based on measurable performance.

You'll Thrive Here If

• You're a player-coach who genuinely enjoys both developing designers and making creative yourself.
• You have strong creative instincts and don't need a perfectly defined brief to start solving a problem.
• You care about results and want to understand not only whether creative performed, but why.
• You can move comfortably between an ad, email, landing page, social asset, print piece, and integrated campaign.
• You iterate without ego and see testing as an opportunity to make the work stronger.
• You're resourceful, proactive, and comfortable solving problems independently.
• You use data to sharpen creative judgment rather than seeing creativity and performance as competing priorities.
• You embrace AI, automation, and systems as ways to increase creative capacity without sacrificing taste or craftsmanship.
• You take ownership and see work through from idea to execution, learning, and improvement.
• You balance high standards with speed and know when further refinement adds value—and when it's time to ship.

How We Work At Wantable

• High ownership. You are trusted to make decisions that directly impact customers and financial performance.
• Hard-working and hands-on. We move fast, stay scrappy, and focus on impact.
• Independent thinkers. We value leaders who confidently make data-driven decisions without layers of approvals.
• Low bureaucracy. We avoid committees, long processes, and unnecessary steps.
• Love of fashion & product. We combine data with intuition to create experiences customers love.
• Results over pedigree. What you've built matters more than where you've been.

Why Wantable?

• Be part of a dynamic, fast-growing company that has innovation and creativity embedded in its DNA.
• A chance to shape our customers’ journey and leave a lasting impact on their self-confidence, one order at a time.
• Join a collaborative environment where your ideas matter, your efforts are rewarded and you can see results in real time.

We have a laid-back, casual environment in a state-of-the-art HQ in Walkers Point.

We offer flexible schedules, paid parental leave (mothers AND fathers), and a private room for nursing mothers.

Even more exciting: paid vacation and seven paid holidays per year, plus a 50% discount on all merchandise and a generous 50% discount on 41Fork Exchange located in the Wantable Cafe at our Corporate HQ in Walker's Point. You’ll be eligible for the discount on your first day!

Important, but maybe less thrilling: we have ample parking, we offer medical (traditional and high deductible), dental, and vision insurance, as well as a 401K (both pre-tax and Roth options).