Creative Director

Hear that? That knocking? It's opportunity. Once in a great while ... once in a career, if you're lucky, the opportunity presents itself to do something truly meaningful, truly important ... so creatively challenging that a positive outcome virtually guarantees a career-building story. This is such an occasion.

FTD, the 108-year-old, iconic floral Brand is reinventing itself and we're looking for a passionate, driven, experienced Creative to help us lead the charge. This is no mere lip service, we're deadly serious. Nothing less that the future of this great brand is at stake.

So, if you've done your stint at the agency. You've done good work, maybe even great work. Now you're ready to get down to business. There isn't a better opportunity to learn about the impact of the creative craft than working for a client company. Here you'll not only do good work but you'll learn what works.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Develop compelling creative concepts that meet the marketing and business objectives of the organization and that advance our brand strategy in a consistent way.
• Persuasively present and recommend preferred creative concepts to executive management, gaining alignment to direction while acting upon useful feedback.
• Manage multiple projects from concept through completion within tight timeframes. Deliver on time and to a high level of quality
• Identify and deliver cost-saving opportunities in the development and execution of marketing materials.
• Define, establish and implement the look of the FTD brand -- a truly iconic brand
• Supervise and inspire the creative team of online designers and copywriters as well as bring in outside resources to complement the internal team as needed
• Provide strong leadership, management and mentoring to the creative team as well as to vendors and external agencies
• Recommend and implement process improvements that streamline the development of creative materials, from creative brief to deployment.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Bachelor's degree in design, fine arts, advertising, copywriting or related field or equivalent visual design and management experience required; graduate degree preferred; groundbreaking portfolio reflecting 8+ years of experience in the interactive space and offline space; minimum of 5 years' management experience working with large-scale web sites, e-marketing, and advertising
• Strong aesthetic sense and intuitive understanding of what makes a truly great interactive experience
• A passion for flowers and their unique role in gifting and conveying meaning
• A drive to inspire great design and ideas in a team environment
• The ability to set vision and drive concepts and strategies through the entire creative and development process
• A solid understanding of both business and user goals and how they relate
• Work experience with premium brands that have a superior aesthetic appearance
• Knowledge of layouts, graphic fundamentals, typography & limitations of the web; must understand current web technologies and have the ability to storyboard or translate ideas to designers and develop innovative motion graphics solutions
• A strong working knowledge of experience design, brand development, interactive commerce and creative process
• Apply best practices in user interface and interactive design, including image optimization and site mapping
• Print and web design capabilities: must know how to work in both media for integrated campaigns
• Ability to lead projects from concept to completion.
• Excellent presentation and communication skills
• Drive constant improvement in the brand's creative quality and capabilities
• Proven ability to manage, forecast and ensure adherence to budget and financial goals and instill a sense of fiscal discipline in the team.
• Managing outside resources, including agencies, photographers, color separators, printers, freelancers, web and interactive sub-contractors
• Expertise with software such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
• Experience with Adobe AfterEffects & Premiere video editing a plus for this position
• Knowledge of HTML, DHTML CSS

The foundation has been laid. Now the critically important work of translating strategy and theory into customer-facing execution lies ahead. If you've ever been involved in a Brand rebuild you know how rare and exiting that can be. If you have not you're in for a treat.

Make no mistake it will not be easy. These things never are. It will be messy. And painful ... there will be blood on the ground. But it will be worth it. You'll be operating in the eye of the storm ... working from our new downtown headquarters in Chicago, working with our business, merchandising and marketing leaders, collaborating with our San Diego-based floral brand, ProFlowers and reporting directly to the VP, Creative.

Great brands don't happen by accident. They are crafted, strategized, designed and nurtured. And the Creative Director is at the forefront of this activity.

So, if you are an experienced CD with the heart to tackle big challenges, a desire to build and lead a high performance creative team, a digital footprint in web design and ecommerce marketing and you have both the book and the background to prove it, send your resume and a link to your portfolio to [email protected] opens an email client application/ [email protected] opens an email client applicationand take the time to smell the roses.