Design Director (Retail Interiors)
4 days ago
City of London
Design Director (Retail Interiors) \n Luxury, Fashion, and Culture-Led Retail \n \n Salary: Up to £70,000 \n Location: East London \n Working pattern: Hybrid (minimum 3 days in studio, 2 from home) \n Sector: Luxury and Culture-Led Retail, Flagship Store Design, Brand Environments, Experiential \n \n About the Studio \n This is an award-winning design agency that builds brand environments with genuine purpose. Their clients are the names that set the pace rather than follow it: luxury fashion houses, directional sportswear and streetwear labels, and the culture-led brands that people queue around the block for. The work is flagship stores, brand houses, seasonal takeovers, and launch moments, made for audiences who notice the difference between a considered space and a merchandised one. \n \n It is grounded in first and second-hand research, human-centred by design, delivered with circular principles embedded from the outset, and executed to a standard the industry is still catching up with. \n \n The team is growing, the culture is collaborative and quality-obsessed, and the briefs are the kind that demand the best from the people delivering them. \n \n About the Role \n This is a genuinely senior hire. As Design Director, you will partner closely with the Creative Director to shape the studio's creative standards and strategic vision, and take creative leadership of retail interiors output from initial concept through to built completion. \n \n The centre of gravity is permanent retail: store design, retail environments, and the kind of physically resolved, consumer-journey-led thinking that distinguishes great retail architecture from decoration. Alongside that, the work spans seasonal programmes, pop-ups, windows, and fixture design, so you'll be comfortable moving between scales and lifespans without dropping the standard. \n \n This is not rollout work. Every project is its own answer, made for a brand with a point of view and an audience who will judge it accordingly. What matters here is materiality, craft, and detail that stands up close, paired with concepts strong enough to survive contact with a client, a budget, and a build programme. You will still be hands-on with pinnacle projects, but your primary value is in the quality and direction of the work across the board. \n \n You will work closely alongside strategy team leads, taking briefs that span fashion, sport, culture, and technology and shaping them into creative responses that are both commercially rigorous and genuinely original. You'll be a pivotal link between creative strategy, client services, and production, and a senior creative contact for key clients in your own right. \n \n You will also carry a line report, with a real responsibility to develop that person's career as thoughtfully as you develop the work. The studio is at a stage where this role has real influence over how the creative offer evolves, and they are looking for someone who wants that responsibility, not just the title. \n \n Your days will look something like this... \n\n • Lead the creative direction of flagship stores, retail interiors, and brand environments from concept through to built completion, maintaining the highest standards at every stage\n, • Partner with the Creative Director to define creative standards, strategic vision, and clear design direction on leading projects\n, • Work hands-on across pinnacle projects (flagships, brand houses, major retail commissions, key activations) while overseeing the creative output of the wider team on concurrent briefs\n, • Translate strategy and cultural insight into tangible, emotionally resonant spatial concepts, and present them so clients understand them and feel excited by them\n, • Push materiality, finish, and detail, specifying with the confidence that comes from knowing how things are actually made\n, • Oversee and direct the production of design intent packs for retail store design, ensuring architectural drawings are accurately interpreted and creatively elevated\n, • Stay close to the build, with site presence through construction and handover to protect design intent all the way to completion\n, • Collaborate with strategy team leads to shape creative responses to briefs, bringing strong conceptual thinking and a grounded understanding of how people move, look, and buy in a space\n, • Lead client presentations and pitches with authority, holding the creative narrative clearly and confidently from first concept to final sign-off\n, • Act as a senior creative contact for key clients, building relationships founded on trust, transparency, and relatability\n, • Scope and quote projects in collaboration with project managers, contributing to realistic timelines, resource planning, and creative scheduling\n, • Brief and manage external creative resource, including freelance designers, holding them to the same standard as the in-house team\n, • Manage, mentor, and actively develop a team spanning senior, mid-weight, and junior designers, with a direct line report to nurture through their career path\n, • Support business development through pitch strategy, quoting, and creative storytelling, and spot opportunities for the studio to grow\n, • Be a visible voice for the work, supporting the studio's marketing and social channels to build the profile of the projects you lead\n, • Drive the studio's creative standards and culture, bringing in new materials, spatial formats, and cultural references, and inputting into internal tools, process, and visual language\n\n \n You might be our perfect match if... \n\n • You have 10+ years designing 3D spaces and interiors, with the majority of that time on permanent retail environments rather than purely event or experiential work\n, • Your portfolio is built on luxury, premium, and culture-led brands: fashion houses, directional sportswear and streetwear, beauty, or the kind of names that shape what comes next. This is a poor fit if your experience is weighted towards high street multiples or value retail rollout\n, • You're culturally fluent, across fashion, art, music, sport, and the way brands and audiences actually behave, and you bring that into the work rather than referencing it after the fact\n, • You have real experience of flagship design, and of seasonal retail, pop-ups, windows, and fixture design, and you understand how each differs from a permanent store fit-out\n, • Your portfolio demonstrates a deep understanding of retail store design: consumer journey thinking, spatial resolution, design intent documentation, and end-to-end delivery\n, • You have a genuine feel for materials and craft, and an excellent understanding of build methods and technical drawings, with on-site experience through construction and handover\n, • You are fluent in Cinema 4D (ideally with Corona Renderer), SketchUp, and Vectorworks, highly proficient across Adobe Creative Suite, particularly InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, and able to pass that knowledge on to more junior designers\n, • You are using AI tools intelligently to sharpen and elevate creative responses\n, • You have a proven track record of leading teams across multiple concurrent briefs, managing senior as well as junior designers, and making the people around you better\n, • You have experience quoting and scoping projects and can hold an intelligent conversation about timelines, resourcing, and creative fees\n, • You lead pitches and presentations with confidence and can win a room as well as hold it\n, • You blend commercial awareness with conceptual bravery, a storyteller at heart but with a realist's grip on what can actually be built\n\n \n Why this one \n\n • A genuinely senior role with real creative authority, in a studio that wants this person to shape its direction, not just manage its output\n, • Clients with cultural weight across luxury fashion, sport, streetwear, and technology, at a scale and standard that makes the work worth doing\n, • Flagship and directional projects rather than rollout, where the detail is allowed to matter and the concept is allowed to be brave\n, • B Corp certified and sustainability-led: the circular design thinking here is real, embedded, and genuinely interesting to work within\n, • Direct partnership with the Creative Director, and a hand in how the creative offer and the team evolve from here\n, • A growing studio at an inflection point, with a London base and an international footprint that signals where this is heading\n, • A hybrid model that respects the need for studio time and focused independent working in equal measure\n\n
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