Senior Art Director

Smalls is a premium DTC cat food and cat lifestyle brand built on a single belief: the cats who matter most to their people deserve food that actually reflects that. We make fresh, human‑grade food for cats, and we've spent eight years building a brand that looks and feels as considered as the product inside the bag.

We’re a focused team building a category‑defining brand. The people here are good at their jobs, take the work seriously, and care about getting it right. We’re growing into new categories and new channels, and we need our creative function to grow with us.

• Visual creative leadership. Brand standards, taste, and final say on what ships. You are the visual authority at every touchpoint. When something doesn’t look like Smalls, you catch it and fix it.

• Art direction across all surfaces. You’ll concept and direct shoots, oversee creative production, and ensure the visual system holds across growth creative, retail displays, packaging, site, social, merch, physical product design, campaign, OOH, email, and collabs — whatever the context, the brand is recognizable and right.

• Team leadership. You’ll manage our Senior Designer, Graphic Designer, and two Product Designers day to day. This means real creative oversight, not just people management. You’ll give direction on work, make calls on large design decisions, and keep the product designers brand‑aligned rather than purely conversion‑focused. You’re comfortable working across both graphic design and product/UX contexts — you don’t need to be a UX practitioner, but you understand the discipline well enough to direct it and hold the brand bar within it.

• Creative process ownership. You’ll define and maintain the creative processes that govern how work moves through the team — from brief to production to final output. You’ll set the standards, own the oversight, and ensure the creative function operates with rigor and consistency.

• Cross‑functional bridge work. You’ll move work through the org, resolve misalignment between creative and other departments before it becomes a bottleneck, and be the creative voice in rooms where brand logic needs an advocate.

• Evolving the system. Smalls is entering new categories. The visual system needs to expand to meet them. You’ll evaluate what the brand demands in new contexts, write briefs, connect the dots across departments, and make the case for or against creative decisions with confidence.

You have 7+ years of experience
, with meaningful time in‑house at a brand where you had to hold visual standards across channels without a large team or agency infrastructure doing it for you. You’ve art‑directed shoots. You’ve managed designers. You’ve been the person who catches drift before it ships.

You think in systems, not assets. You can look at a brief, a collab proposal, or a new product category and ask: what does the brand demand here? And then answer that question with conviction.

You have strong enough design instincts to give the design team real creative direction
, not just approvals. You understand the difference between a brand‑led product experience and a conversion‑optimized one, and you know how to hold the former while respecting the latter.

You have working fluency in both graphic design and UX/UI contexts — enough to direct product designers meaningfully and hold the brand standard across digital surfaces, not just print and campaign.

You manage well. The team here is talented, detail‑oriented, and tends toward caution. You bring clarity and creative energy without creating anxiety. You can make a decisive call and move on.

You have a cat, or you’re genuinely willing to get one. This isn’t a culture fit checkbox — it’s functional. You’ll be briefing,…