Brand Creative Lead

About Restoke

Restoke is AI that runs restaurants behind the scenes. Thousands of venues around the world use us to run their restaurants like machines and get their headspace back.

We were founded by a restaurateur and a machine learning specialist who believed restaurant operators deserved better tools. Today we are an ambitious global company growing into international markets, with a bold brand and a lot more stories to tell.

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The role

We are looking for a Brand Creative Lead to own how Restoke shows up in the world. 

This is not a role for someone waiting to be briefed. We want the person with too many ideas and not enough hours. The one who walks into a room with three concepts nobody asked for, and one of them changes the plan.

You will own the brand directive and guard the brand across every surface it touches: language, visuals, messaging, tone, social, web, video, sales and product. You will set the tone, build on what is already there, and take it somewhere it has not been. When something is off brand, you are the one who says so, including to the founders.

Great execution is the floor, not the job. You will take an idea from first sketch through to a full campaign and make the key pieces yourself. But it’s what you come up with that sets you apart, not only what you can produce.

You will report to our CMO and work closely with the founders, our US Creative Content Manager, our in-house designer, and the growth team. You will be the senior creative voice, setting the bar and direction for everyone who makes creative with us, rather than managing direct reports. As we grow, the function grows around you. The role is roughly 60 percent hands-on creative work and 40 percent creative direction and collaboration.

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What you will own

The ideas. The big ones. The ones that make an industry stop scrolling. You bring them, you sell them, you make them real. We’re uncomfortable with comfortable. 

The brand. Not just how it looks. How it sounds, feels and behaves, in every market we enter and every place a customer meets us.

The bar. Everyone here makes creative. You decide what is good enough to go out.

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What you will do

• Come up with the ideas. Develop creative concepts and visual worlds for brand and marketing campaigns, and bring the founders big thinking unprompted.
• Own the brand directive. Keep Restoke distinctive and consistent across platforms, language, visuals and messaging as we grow into new markets.
• Write headlines, ad lines, landing pages and campaign ideas that push the brand forward and communicate the Restoke edge.
• Design key campaign assets and carry ideas across paid social, landing pages, email, video and presentations.
• Art-direct photography, video, illustration and motion when a campaign calls for it.
• Evolve Restoke's visual identity and build the guidelines and systems that keep it sharp.
• Build templates and reusable components so a small team can make excellent work fast.
• Keep a steady shipping cadence. We test creative often and learn quickly. A strong idea in market this week beats a perfect one next month.
• Work with growth marketing to understand how creative performs, and use it to make the next one better.
• Present creative thinking clearly, and guide founders, stakeholders and partners through it.
• Stay close to restaurant operators so the work reflects the reality, energy and character of hospitality.

What we are really looking for

• A head full of ideas that cannot wait to get out. Volume and originality, both.
• The nerve to push way past comfortable. Safe work is the one thing we cannot use.
• Real protectiveness over the brand. You care what happens to it when you are not in the room.
• A point of view you will defend. Bring the argument, hold your ground, change our minds.
• Taste sharp enough to know that good is not the same as great.

Being good is sub par here. We are building a brand people remember, in an industry that deserves better than beige.

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What you will bring

• Ideally 2 to 8 years in a creative agency or an in-house brand. Consumer, retail, hospitality, lifestyle or another fast-moving category preferred.
• A portfolio that shows the idea, not only the output. We want to see the thinking and how it came to life across channels.
• Excellent visual design and art-direction skills, with the ability to make polished work yourself.
• Strong working knowledge of Figma and Adobe Creative Suite.
• An understanding of how brand creative earns attention, action and commercial results.
• The ability to move between an open-ended concept and the practical detail required to ship it.
• Experience making performance creative for paid channels, and genuine interest in how it performs.
• Comfortable using AI tools as a normal part of creative exploration and production. We are an AI company and expect this to be part of how you work. The judgement and taste remain yours.
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to feedback.
• Curiosity, good judgement, and the confidence to back yourself.

You do not need to have been a Creative Director or run a large team. This could be your first formal lead role. What matters is the thinking.

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Useful, but not essential

• Experience in hospitality, restaurants, food, retail or venues.
• Experience in a startup, scale-up or lean in-house creative team.
• Skills in motion, video editing, photography, illustration or web design.

Who this is not for

• Anyone whose first instinct is to play it safe.
• Anyone who agrees with the founders to keep the peace.
• Anyone looking for comfort and security. We are growing globally and it moves fast.
• Anyone who wants a brief handed to them and then to be left alone.

If that puts you off, no hard feelings. If it is the most interesting thing you have read this week, we should talk.

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Why Restoke

• Take real ownership of a distinctive brand at an important stage of growth, including equity, so the brand you build is partly yours.
• Work directly with the people building the company and stay close to the customers using the product.
• Create across a wide range of formats, markets and creative problems.
• Build the creative function and the systems around it, rather than inheriting them.
• Make work for an industry with real character, real pressure, and plenty worth talking about.

Restaurant operators put everything into creating places other people love. Restoke handles more of the operational grind so they can put that energy back into the food, the team and the experience.

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How to apply

Send your resume, cover letter and some examples of previous work to careers@restoke.ai.

In your cover letter, include:

• Relevant experience. Your work in brand and campaign creative across copywriting, art direction and design, and across digital, social, video and paid channels.
• One idea. Something you would want to make for Restoke. Rough is fine. We care about the thinking, not the polish.
• For bonus points. Your favourite hospitality experience or memory.