marketing manager (CPG)

A profitable, growing US-based specialty tea CPG brand (~15% YoY, 130K+ lifetime orders, warehouses in the US, Canada, UK, and EU) selling primarily through Shopify and TikTok Shop, built on authentic sourcing, education, and a founder-creator with millions of followers who is, today, the company's entire marketing engine. The brand ships frequent new product lines (two launches in the next four months alone) and runs a quarterly subscription program (~2,000 members) that is the growth core. The founder built the entire business on organic content and the company has never run paid ads. Marketing today is a set of good ideas with no owner: email , loyalty, referrals, collabs, community, contests. Your job is to become that owner, and to build the machine around the founder's audience instead of depending on it.
One thing to know before you apply: nothing customer-facing here is AI-generated. All creative is real and hand-made. That is the brand's identity, not a policy. See "How this company uses AI" below; it will d ---------- whether this role is for you.

The role
You own marketing end to end. This is a content-led brand: high-quality entertainment and infotainment IS the acquisition engine, and everything you do in paid, email , and lifecycle has to interact coherently with the organic machine, not run beside it. You understand how paid and organic feed each other and you manage brand awareness as one system.
The mandate runs in a deliberate order. First, find the leaks and build the scoreboard: subscription drop-off, paused members, one-time buyers, and the KPI system to see it all. Second, stand up paid media and get the email and lifecycle machine performing. Third, once the fundamentals run, expand into organic collaboration: creator collabs, bigger content plays, deeper integration with the founder's production. The wrong hire walks in asking for a big ad budget. The right hire walks in asking where the money is leaking and what the data says.
You are a player-coach, weighted toward player early. You personally run media strategy and media buying (today's AI-powered buying tools make this a one-person job at this scale) until the marketing arm grows enough to justify dedicated hands, at which point you help define that hire. The email specialist reports to you and executes email and lifecycle operations under your direction. You'll also coordinate with the rest of the small team around marketing: a Shopify/ecommerce operations person and the founder's YouTube account manager.
On creative: you are close to a creative director who never creates. The founder is the creator. He likes performing, he WANTS to make ads, and he already has some in production. Your job is to make that enthusiasm strategic and intentional: understand the brand's edges and preferences deeply enough to direct email , paid media, and collab work cohesively without ever violating the ethos, and to tell him exactly what the data says he should make next. He will make you one great ad at a time, not fifteen mediocre ones.
This is not a strategy-deck job. You make tactical judgment calls on messaging, audiences, offers, and budget the same day they come up, and you push initiatives to done. The unofficial title is "the person who makes marketing ideas stop dying in the parking lot."

What you'll do
Find the leaks and build the scoreboard
Diagnose subscription drop-off: who leaves, when (the drop after box two and three is the known weak point), and why
Quantify how much meat is on the bone: lapsed members, paused subscriptions, one-time buyers who never subscribed, email list segments that never converted

Think in the levers that multiply the business: LTV, AOV, CAC, churn, and net-new customers. When the data to see a lever doesn't exist, you fix the measurement system so it does
Run the win-back loop for paused and lapsed members, working with the internal AI survey systems that surface why people pause

Run paid media yourself
Launch paid ads from zero (Meta first, TikTok second) with an intro test budget, personally owning media strategy and buying with modern AI-powered tools

Approach ads from first principles: early paid is a learning instrument. Breaking even early on is a perfectly good outcome; the bar is don't bleed money while collecting the data that verifies hunches and shapes the growth plan, then refine and iterate from there

Run the full range deliberately: put cash behind organic content that's already working, test odd angles, and run boring direct-response ads. You have to be comfortable with both the weird and the boring
Build the creative testing plan around the founder's content and the ads he has in production; brief him on what to make next based on what the data says

Own holiday-season ad buying (Oct through Feb is the season)
Earn the budget: scale spend only as unit economics prove out, and be the person telling the founder when NOT to spend

Own email , lifecycle, and loyalty
Set strategy for and manage the email specialist, who executes email and lifecycle operations under your direction
Evolve loyalty into a VIP program and fold the referral program into its tiers
Multiply LTV and AOV: bundles, premium tiers, subscription upgrades, win-backs
Expand the organic machine (stage two, after the fundamentals run)

Lead creator collab strategy, including YouTube collaborations: you set the strategy and direct it, with outreach and legwork resources added as the workload materializes
Surface-manage the content production workflow (the founder has a YouTube account manager) enough to keep it moving and connected to the rest of marketing
Deepen the paid-organic loop as both sides mature

Run the machine
Build the marketing calendar and own cross-channel coordination across Shopify and TikTok Shop: a constant new-product launch cadence (next two launches already scheduled for mid-September and November) and the holiday season
Direct the founder's creative production: batched, specific asks with clear briefs, on his rhythm
Run the AI marketing stack for analytics and orchestration, and teach: make sure the whole team understands what the numbers say and why

Be our eyes and ears on the marketing org: as channels prove out, you define the next roles the team needs and help us scope them

Who survives here
The founder runs this company as a creator and an artist. He will not work 70-hour weeks, he will not sit in frequent syncs, and he does not want to be managed hard. There are standing weekly team calls and brand-alignment checks; beyond that, you get batched, well-prepared asks and a lot of autonomy.
The person who thrives: a first-principles thinker who asks "what are the alternatives" and comes at problems from angles, cares deeply about brand ethos and being genuine, and is flexible and adaptable when the picture changes. Low ego, systems-builder, gets energy from ownership rather than access, treats the founder as a scarce production resource and designs the work around that constraint. A sense of humor is close to required: the brand runs on it. The person who fails: needs frequent alignment meetings, wants to "workshop the vision" repeatedly, bulldozes the founder's constraints in the name of growth, or is too proud to run boring ads.

How this company uses AI
The company runs a deliberate split: aggressive AI adoption in operations, a hard wall around anything creative or customer-facing. This role sits exactly on that line and has to hold it.

The wall (creative side)

• Nothing customer-facing is AI-generated. No AI images ever, no AI-written copy shipped as-is. This is brand identity, not a preference: the entire premise of the brand is that everything is real. Real sourcing trips, real photos, real people.
• The standard is cultural, not just a rule. Real example: product photos came back with dust on them right before a launch, the founder was unreachable, and the team spent hours manually retouching the dust out rather than AI-recreating the images, because they knew that is what he would want. That instinct is the hiring bar.
• AI-assisted drafting is tolerated only when the shipped output is written by hand or aggressively reviewed by hand. AI passing as human is the sin. A previous team member put an obviously AI-generated image into an internal test email ; it never shipped and it was still treated as a serious culture violation.

The embrace (operations side)

• The company builds internal AI agents aggressively: live inventory and logistics answers for the CS team, a demand-prediction model for new products, and a customer survey loop that maps the customer journey.
• The founder's stated goal is a middle road: full transparency with the team about how AI is used, so nobody feels they are training their replacement, and AI kept as far from the creative side as possible.

What this means for you

• You manage the AI marketing setup: agent-driven ad analytics and orchestration (think "this ad is overperforming in one region, redivert budget"), AI-powered media buying, research, segmentation, reporting, workflow. Analytics and orchestration, yes. Generating ads, images, or copy that ships, no.
• You are also the translator: part of the job is making sure everyone on the team understands what the AI spend analytics say and why, in plain language.
• The founder believes AI slop is destroying trust in faceless content and low-tier influencer marketing, and that this brand's realness becomes MORE valuable as that happens. He has watched an agency lose his business by sending an unchecked AI-generated proposal. Pitching AI-generated creator content or mass AI outreach in your interview ends the interview.

What you've done before

• 6+ years across multiple marketing channels with your own hands: paid social, email /retention, loyalty or referral programs, influencer or community marketing
• Hands-on media strategy and media buying: you have personally planned, bought, and optimized paid media, not just