Agency-Based | Outdoor, Lifestyle & Active IndustriesPosition Overview
We are seeking an experienced, strategic, and highly collaborative Creative Director to lead the creative vision and execution of campaigns, content, and brand experiences for clients across the outdoor, lifestyle, wellness, fitness, sport, travel, and active industries.
This agency-based role will work across multiple client accounts, translating business objectives, audience insights, and brand positioning into compelling creative strategies and culturally relevant content. The Creative Director will lead projects from initial concept through production, delivery, and rollout, ensuring that every asset is strategically grounded, visually distinctive, operationally sound, and aligned with each client’s brand standards.
The ideal candidate is both a visionary creative leader and a strong operator—someone who can inspire teams, present and defend ideas, build trusted client relationships, and confidently manage the details required to deliver high-quality work across multiple channels and timelines.
Creative Leadership and Vision
Lead the conceptual, strategic, and visual direction of seasonal campaigns, evergreen content programs, product launches, brand initiatives, and ongoing client communications.
Establish and maintain a distinctive, consistent, and relevant visual identity for each client.
Influence the look, feel, tone, and overall creative expression of brand assets across regional, national, and global markets.
Translate strategic insights, marketing objectives, audience needs, and business goals into clear creative strategies and engaging content platforms.
Develop creative approaches that inspire, move, and connect with end users while authentically expressing each brand’s purpose, values, and point of view.
Set creative standards and provide direction across photography, video, graphic design, digital artwork, motion design, typography, copy integration, and branded experiences.
Stay current on emerging trends in culture, design, digital marketing, social media, technology, production, and the outdoor, lifestyle, and active industries.
Identify opportunities to evolve and strengthen client brands while maintaining consistency with established brand guidelines.
Concept Development:
Generate original ideas in response to creative briefs, strategic assignments, campaign objectives, and client needs.
Lead the development of creative concepts, campaign platforms, content series, product stories, and integrated brand experiences.
Create and oversee concept boards, mood boards, visual references, style guides, treatments, sketches, mockups, storyboards, and presentation materials.
Clearly communicate creative concepts, strategic rationale, intended audience impact, and production approach to clients and internal stakeholders.
Present, sell, and defend creative ideas with confidence, clarity, and sound strategic reasoning.
Develop custom content ideas and creative approaches for retail, ecommerce, wholesale, merchandising, sales, social, editorial, digital, and experiential channels.
Ensure creative ideas are scalable and adaptable across formats, markets, platforms, and stages of the customer journey.
Lead creative projects from concept development through pre-production, production, post-production, final delivery, and rollout.
Plan, strategize, and execute lifestyle and product photography and videography shoots.
Drive and direct global and regional campaign photo and video shoots, ensuring that the creative vision is consistently realized on set and through post-production.
Develop creative treatments, shot lists, storyboards, casting direction, location recommendations, styling direction, production schedules, and visual references.
Collaborate closely with photographers, directors, videographers, producers, stylists, set designers, editors, animators, retouchers, developers, and other production specialists.
Provide creative direction during casting, location scouting, pre-production meetings, shoots, editing sessions, color grading, retouching, sound design, animation, and final delivery.
Balance creative ambition with budget, schedule, logistics, production realities, client needs, and usage requirements.
Review and approve work at all stages to ensure quality, consistency, accuracy, and alignment with the approved creative direction.
Experience leading both in-house and external creative, production, and freelance teams.
As necessary, must be proficient shooting still imagery to lead or supplement campaigns, provide BTS imagery or conceptual imagery.
Team Leadership and Collaboration
Lead and manage in-house, freelance, outsourced, and partner creative teams across multiple client accounts.
Direct photographers, videographers, production teams, stylists, designers, developers, editors, agencies, and other external specialists.
Build and facilitate a highly motivated, collaborative, inclusive, and accountable creative environment.
Establish clear expectations, responsibilities, workflows, feedback processes, and quality standards for project teams.
Mentor and develop creative talent, supporting professional growth and encouraging new perspectives.
Assemble the right creative and production resources for each project based on scope, budget, timeline, and required expertise.
Manage contract and freelance production staff, including sourcing, briefing, scheduling, negotiating, onboarding, and evaluating external partners.
Foster strong relationships across creative, strategy, account management, production, marketing, digital, sales, merchandising, retail, and leadership teams.
Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to ensure creative work is strategically aligned and operationally effective.