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

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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…