Director of Growth & Brand Activation

The Honest Kitchen; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 145,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Generous time off

Health insurance

401K with employer match

Volunteer time off

Pet‑friendly offices

Job summary

The Honest Kitchen, Inc. is seeking a Director of Growth & Brand Activation to own the demand engine for our DTC channel and to lead the brand activation engine across PR, influencer, affiliate, and organic social efforts.

You will manage three direct reports focused on performance media, brand activation, and creative development. You’ll collaborate with the Brand Director and DTC leader to align media strategy with site revenue, customer experience, and omni‑channel objectives.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in growth or performance marketing across omnichannel environments.
• Hands-on paid media management with budgets and agencies.
• Fluency in creative as performance drivers and brief development.
• Experience leading multiple internal teams and prioritization processes.
• Track record delivering brand strategies that perform in retail and DTC contexts.
• Lifecycle and retention experience (email, SMS, subscriptions).
• People leadership including mentoring managers or senior contributors.
• Comfort with data, attribution models and retail media trends.
• Bias to ship and experiment, balancing brand and demand.

Responsibilities

• Set strategic direction for digital media investment: channel roles, spend mix, and measurement.
• Lead brand activation strategy for PR, influencer and organic social; operationalize by channel.
• Oversee creative operations across packaging, retail assets, and ecommerce content.
• Ensure the creative-performance loop informs next campaigns and optimizes learnings.
• Own lifecycle programs from onboarding to retention and win-back in DTC.
• Provide clear reporting on performance, attribution, and incremental impact.

Skills

Growth marketing

Paid media

Brand activation

Lifecycle marketing

Team leadership

Data-driven

Retail media

AI in marketing

Job description

At The Honest Kitchen, we believe pets deserve the same quality of food as the humans who love them. As pioneers of human grade pet food, we use thoughtfully sourced ingredients and gentle preparation methods to create foods that are as wholesome as they are nutritious. We’re a purpose-driven, growth-minded, proud B Corp, (which is a legal corporate structure that allows us to operate and make decisions based upon a triple bottom line, factoring in social and environmental impacts right alongside our prioritization of long‑term financial sustainability!) company made up of people who care deeply about pets, their parents, and each other. If you’re looking to do meaningful work in a collaborative, entrepreneurial environment where your ideas can make a real impact, you’ll feel right at home here.

We strive for an inclusive work culture that supports a diverse array of skills, experiences, and perspectives our employees bring to the table. For us, differences are a source of strength. We celebrate strong performance and ethical processes, and we work hard every day to nurture an inclusive culture where all employees can innovate and thrive. Here, you will not only build your career, but you will also uncover new experiences and collaborate with passionate colleagues.

The Honest Kitchen values a diverse workforce. Everyone, including women, people of color, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community are strongly encouraged to apply. The Honest Kitchen believes that an equitable and inclusive work environment and a diverse, empowered team are key to achieving our mission. We’re looking for candidates who can expand our business culture by bringing their whole, authentic selves to work. We strive to provide all qualified candidates with an equitable and accessible recruitment process.

POSITION SUMMARY (“What are we looking for?”)

We're looking for a Director of Growth & Brand Activation to own two things that drive the business in equal measure: the demand engine that acquires new customers through our owned DTC channel, and the brand activation engine – the PR, influencer, affiliate, and organic social work that drives awareness and engagement with our brand, plus the creative that fuels every channel we sell through.

You’ll lead three direct reports covering performance media and lifecycle, brand activation (PR, influencer, affiliate, organic social) and creative development. On the media side, your focus is our owned digital spend — the channels driving traffic and subscribers to thehonestkitchen.com. On the brand activation side, you own how we build awareness and engagement outside of paid media. On the creative side, your team produces packaging, retail POS, ecommerce content and the assets behind our media-driven channels; brand campaigns and DTC performance creative all run through you.

You’ll sit alongside peers who make this work. Our Brand Director owns brand strategy, innovation, portfolio, and retail — they set the story and how it should show up at retail, you make it travel and perform. Our DTC leader owns site revenue and the on‑site experience — you make sure the right media is driving the right traffic to it, against the same number. Our eCommerce team runs Amazon and Chewy with their own media agency — you make sure they have creative that wins on those channels.

What you’ll own

Paid media strategy and performance. Set the strategic direction for our digital media investment: channel roles, spend allocation, and the evidence bar (including our media mix modeling) that decisions get defended against. Your Performance Marketing Manager owns the budget and the agency relationship day‑to‑day; you set the strategy they execute against and hold the line when short‑term efficiency pressure threatens to starve the top of funnel.

Brand activation.Partner with our Brand Director on the strategy for how we build awareness and engagement outside of paid media — PR, influencer, and organic social — then define how that strategy comes to life by channel, working closely with our Sr Partnerships Manager to get it there.

Creative as a company‑wide engine. Your team serves brand, DTC and eCommerce. That means running a creative operation that can absorb demand from three directions and still ship on time: clear intake, honest prioritization, a realistic view of capacity, and agency partners scaled to fill the gaps. Volume and speed matter here as much as craft.

The creative‑performance loop.Make sure what you learn from media actually changes what you make next — and that the read comes back from every channel, including the ones you don't buy yourself.

Lifecycle and retention.Partner on subscriber acquisition, onboarding, retention and win‑back. In DTC, the second order is where the business is made.

Measurement.Own the reporting rhythm: what's working, what isn't, what we're changing. Bring a clear point of view on incrementality and attribution — and be honest when the data is ambiguous.

Team leadership.Develop three managers into stronger operators and hold our agency partners to a high bar. Make them better, not just busier.

Your team

• Sr. Partnership Manager— PR, affiliate, influencer and organic social
• Performance Marketing Manager— paid media agency and spend across digital channels, ad creative development, and lifecycle management
• Creative Design Manager— owns creative operations end‑to‑end: intake, prioritization, and traffic across packaging, retail POS, website/ecommerce content, and other channel needs as they arise.

Each is supported by agency partners.

What you bring

• 10+ years in growth or performance marketing at an omni‑channel business – not DTC‑only. You’ve had to balance brand and demand investment across channels where DTC wasn’t the majority of revenue, and you know that changes the math versus a pure‑play DTC brand.
• Deep, hands‑on paid media experience — you’ve owned a budget, managed agencies, and you can tell when you’re being managed rather than served
• Real fluency in creative and content as performance drivers. You know what makes an ad work, you can brief it, and you can tell a creative team why something didn’t
• Experience running creative for more than one internal customer. You’ve built intake and prioritization that people actually follow, and you’re comfortable saying “not this month” to a peer
• A track record of working with brand rather than around it. You’ve taken someone else’s brand platform and made it perform without sanding off what made it distinctive
• Lifecycle and retention experience — email, SMS, subscription mechanics
• People leadership experience. You’ve managed managers or senior individual contributors and made them better
• Comfort with data. You can build the model, question the attribution, and explain the tradeoff to a non‑marketer
• Plugged in. You know what’s happening in creator economics, in retail media, in AI‑assisted content production — and you can separate the signal from the hype
• Bias to ship. You’d rather test something imperfect this month than perfect something for next quarter

Bonus points for: Amazon or retail media experience — you don't need to buy it here, but knowing what performs on those platforms means our eCommerce team gets sharper assets; pet, food, CPG or wellness experience; working across both DTC and retail.

How we work

We're a lean team with excellent agency partners. That means your ideas move fast and you have real ownership — and it also means you'll be closer to the work than you might be at a bigger company. If you want to build the plan and see it live, this is a good fit. If you're looking to purely direct from above, it isn't.

Our values aren't wall art:

• Cultivate Connections— we lead with compassion, internally and externally
• Consciously Disrupt— we ask the tough questions and challenge the status quo, including our own
• Be Dogged— we're accountable, resourceful, and we don't take shortcuts

WHY YOU’LL LOVE WORKING HERE (“What makes us different?”)

• Mission‑driven brand making a real difference in pets’ lives
• High‑growth environment with room to shape strategy and programs
• Collaborative, values‑led culture that supports both people and pets
• Opportunity to work on a category‑leading, human‑grade brand with strong consumer loyalty

BENEFITS OF WORKING FOR THE HONEST KITCHEN (“What do we offer?”)

We offer a competitive compensation package, including salary and robust employee benefits. Some key highlights include:

• Time off: We offer a highly competitive time off schedule, including flexible vacation and additional sick time, in addition to a generous company‑paid holiday schedule.
• Benefits: Various health insurance plans with generous employer contributions to premiums. We also offer vision, dental, short‑term disability, long‑term disability, accident, critical illness, an employee assistance program, and an FSA/HSA.
• Financial wellness: Enjoy perks like a company 401K with an employer match.
• Mission Driven: Employees can take up to 40 hours of volunteer time a year, and we offer donation matching to non‑profit organizations of your choosing.
• Pet Friendly: Pet‑friendly offices, discounts on pet insurance, and of course, free pet food!
• Collaborative Team: We offer a fun, team‑oriented work environment where you feel like you are making a difference every day.

The salary range for this role is: $145,000 - $165,000/year

As a Public Benefit Corporation, our company's practices and outputs are assessed and evaluated across five categories: Governance, Workers, Community, The Environment, and Customers.We track our social and environmental impact over time and publicly disclose our performance in our annual impact report.

As an employee of a Certified B Corp, it is required that in performing your role, you factor social and environmental impacts into decision‑making and actions as they