Lead Brand Strategist

Ancient + Brave | B Corp; Lewes; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Private Medical Insurance

Medicash plan

25 days holiday + Wellbeing day

ESG invested pension

Mintago platform access

Training & development

50% off A+B products

Job summary

Ancient + Brave in Lewes is seeking an experienced Brand & Creative Strategy lead to guard and evolve our brand position. You will translate science and customer understanding into differentiated product narratives and cross‑market frameworks.

Reporting to the Chief Brand & Creative Officer, you’ll shape strategic direction, partner with creative and product teams, and embed brand thinking across the organisation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in brand and creative strategy at a leading agency or in-house.
• Portfolio of brand positioning and strategy with measurable impact.
• Experience turning qualitative and quantitative customer research into direction.
• In-house or embedded collaboration with business-critical branding.
• Experience applying brand thinking to product, content, retail and international markets.
• Understanding the commercial realities of a fast-paced scale-up.

Responsibilities

• Lead the ongoing evolution of the A+B brand position, translating strategic logic into brand narrative and frameworks that guide all activities.
• Own product-level customer facing positioning for every product in the range, grounded in science and evidence.
• Develop strategic frameworks that ensure consistent brand expression across markets, channels, and formats.
• Work with the Founder, Chief Brand + Creative Officer and Creative Director to ensure strategy drives world-class creativity.
• Be the authority on the A+B customer; translate research into powerful, actionable insight.
• Turn data into narrative to move teams from analysis to brave creative leaps.
• Partner the creative and product teams to deliver strategically grounded, inspiring briefs and outcomes.
• Embed brand strategy across the organisation, collaborating with marketing, e-commerce, retail and international teams.

Skills

Brand positioning

Creative strategy

Customer insight

Data storytelling

Cross-functional

Written communication

Job description

THE ROLE

Ancient + Brave has a profound sense of identity and purpose. We are a brand with a deep belief in the power of bravery to change the world and we have created a science backed business and product portfolio designed to maximise the potential of our customer to live with bravery in small moments and big.

Our opportunity is to turn this USP into true strategic advantage, translating our sharp positioning into a strategic, scalable and competitive brand approach underpinned by science, rooted in customer understanding. The vision is to apply this brand as an operating system across our business, building impact through time.

The role reports directly to the Chief Brand and Creative Officer and owns the strategic layer that powers our creative: you will be the guardian of brand position, define and refine customer facing product positioning, working with customer, brand and cultural insight to apply the brand to challenges across the organisation. This is not just a thinking role, the right person will translate the brand into action across the business, using the power of our brand to drive measurable step change in business performance.

What You’ll Do

Brand and product positioning

• Lead the ongoing evolution of the A+B brand position, translating strategic logic into brand narrative, and frameworks that guide all that we do. Creating tools that act as generators of ideas, this is not the brand police.
• Own product‑level customer facing positioning for every product in the range: developing clear, differentiated narratives grounded in science and evidence, relevant to audiences and inspiring to our creative teams.
• Develop the strategic frameworks that allow the brand to be expressed consistently across markets, channels, and formats without becoming rigid.
• Work with the Founder, Chief Brand + Creative Officer and Creative Director to ensure strategy is the catalyst of true, world class creativity across time.

Customer insight and research

• Be the authority on the A+B customer: who they are, what they believe, what drives their decisions, be able to articulate what they need from the brand at every stage of their journey.
• Be at the forefront of wellness category trends, competitive positioning shifts, and cultural movements that affect how our brand and business should show up and bring that intelligence into the room unprompted.
• Own all branded customer research: commission it, manage it, and translate it into powerful insight that changes the course of our business.
• Turn data into narrative with an exceptional ability to move from data to stories that change how teams think about their work.

Creative strategy partnership

• Partner the creative team on strategically significant projects, bringing the strategic rigour and inspiration to unlock genuinely distinctive work.
• Write NPD briefs and support in the ad‑hoc improvement of BAU marketing briefs helping teams keep them strategically grounded and creatively inspiring.
• Act as a strategic partner to the Creative Director, bringing insight and provocation to ensure work solves problems in the most interesting way.
• Support the performance creative teams with insight and product positioning beyond what they get from their own platform data to enable the development of creatively diverse, winning work.

Embedding strategy across the organisation

• Work cross‑functionally to make brand strategy an operating system that supports the whole business; partner marketing, e‑commerce, retail, and international teams on the specific strategic questions that matter most to their work from NPD to brand delivery in international markets.
• Be a critical friend on commercial and brand projects where a sharp strategic point of view can unlock opportunity.

Your Background

• A minimum of 8 years experience in brand and creative strategy, most likely at a leading agency before going in house. You grew up in environments where strategic rigour and creative ambition were held in equal regard.
• A portfolio of brand positioning and creative strategy work that shows both depth of thinking and impact; we want to see work that changed how a business understood its brand or its customers and thinking that affected more than just advertising campaigns.
• Experience owning and interpreting customer research across qualitative and quantitative outcomes, turning insight into actionable strategic direction.
• A track record of working in‑house, or as an embedded partner to in‑house teams, on business‑critical brand and creative challenges.
• Experience applying brand strategy beyond traditional advertising formats into product, content, partnerships, retail, and international markets as a respected and valued individual contributor to specialist teams.
• Clear understanding of the commercial realities of a fast‑paced scale‑up and experience in delivering brand thinking at pace.

Who You Are

• You are restlessly curious, always reading something, noticing something, connecting something and bringing that energy to every problem.
• A lateral thinker. You see the non‑obvious angle on a problem and back it with the evidence to create unreasonably successful outcomes.
• As comfortable with data as you are with ideas. You interpret data with precision and use it to build confidence into brave creative leaps.
• You aren’t precious about where the good thinking comes from. You see your role as to make the brand better, not to protect a point of view.
• You operate as a partner, not a consultant. Embedded, collaborative, and committed to shared outcomes.
• You believe nothing is impossible. You solve problems to the left and right of the brief, not just in front of it.
• You write exceptionally well, and inspire the people around you. You know strategy isn’t good unless it can be interpreted and used easily.
• You are not precious, you know that perfection is the enemy of progress and you perfectly balance when to push back and when to push forward.
• Pace energises you and despite your experience, you still thrive on doing, not managing. This is a role for an individual contributor who rolls up their sleeves and makes a difference on day 1.

We are an equal‑opportunity employer and are committed to an inclusive and diverse workplace culture.

Ways of Working

We are a fast‑paced scale‑up and being together in person makes a real difference to how we collaborate and move the business forward. We expect you to be happy to commute to our head office in Lewes, East Sussex on a full‑time basis.

Why Join Us

• We pay a discretionary bonus based on a mix of company performance and individual contributions and review our salaries annually.
• Our Private Medical Insurance is designed to support your health and wellbeing, providing swift access to high‑quality care whenever you need it most.
• Our Medicash plan offers access to specialist consultations, 24/7 Virtual GP and health screenings as well as dental, optical and complementary therapies and access to confidential support via its EAP programme.
• In addition to our regular annual holiday allowance of 25 days plus bank holidays, we also offer one Wellbeing day to use as needed.
• Our pension contributions are ESG invested (so no pharma, weapons or other ethically questionable investments).
• Our Mintago platform gives employees access to financial wellbeing advice and support as well as retail discounts and salary sacrifice schemes, which cover childcare, cycle to work, gym membership, groceries, electric vehicle and mobile/tech purchase.
• We offer continuous training & professional development opportunities and our team members get to enjoy complimentary nutrition and meditation sessions in the office.
• Our kitchen is fully stocked with the usual supplies as well as a limitless supply of A+B products (you also get 50% off on any product you wish to purchase).
• We hold two social events a year to come together and connect in a meaningful way.
• We provide all our team members with suitable laptop computers & headphones and our office is equipped with monitors, ergonomic chairs and sitting and standing desks.