Creative Services Leader (m/f/x)

Oettinger Davidoff Group, with sales of over half a billion Swiss francs and over 4,000 employees around the world, traces its roots back to 1875 and remains family-owned to this day. The company is dedicated to the business of producing, marketing, distributing, and retailing premium-branded cigars, tobacco products and accessories. The premium-branded cigar business includes Davidoff, AVO, Camacho, Cusano, The Griffin's, Private Stock, Zino and Zino Platinum. Oettinger Davidoff Group is also the sole agent of many brands in several countries. Its business is anchored in a strong "crop to shop" philosophy, having pursued vertical integration from the tobacco fields in the Dominican Republic and Honduras to its global network of 65 Davidoff flagship stores/satellites and strong appointed merchants in over 130 countries.
Creative Services Leader (m/f/x)
Responsibilities
Creative team leadership: Lead and manage the internal creative team, including designers, videographers and creative specialists. Develop team capabilities, priorities and workload management, and ensure high standards of creative quality and brand consistency across all deliverables.
Creative operations and workflow management: Establish clear creative processes, briefing systems and approval workflows, and act as the main interface between creative resources and business stakeholders. Improve ways of working to increase efficiency, prioritisation and delivery speed, adopt the latest technology to improve productivity, reduce fragmented communication and ensure structured project management.
Cross-functional coordination: Partner closely with marketing, trade marketing, digital and corporate teams. Translate business objectives into clear creative direction and priorities, and ensure alignment between brand strategy and creative execution.
Creative excellence and asset development: Oversee the creation of premium visual assets, videos, presentations, campaigns and retail materials. Ensure all creative outputs reflect the company's luxury positioning and visual identity, and support innovation and continuous improvement in creative execution.
External partner management: Manage external creative partners, including agencies, freelancers and production houses, where internal capacity or specialist skills require it.
Brand asset governance: Maintain the central library of brand assets, templates and toolkits so that markets and functions can work on brand autonomously. Safeguard the global brand identity guidelines and advise on their application across markets and channels.
Qualifications and experience
Strong experience in creative management, design operations or brand communications, ideally within premium, luxury or lifestyle environments
Proven experience leading, coordinating and developing multidisciplinary creative teams across design, video and production, including the day-to-day orchestration of workload, priorities and parallel deadlines
A track record of coordinating teams and contributors who do not all report to you, bringing internal specialists, external partners and business stakeholders into one coherent way of working
Track record of building creative processes: briefing, prioritisation, approval and delivery workflows that shorten lead times without diluting quality
Strong organisational and project management skills, with the ability to run many parallel projects and stakeholders
Strong understanding of luxury brand aesthetics and premium execution standards across print, digital, retail and film
Substantial experience working with marketing and creative agencies as part of creative operations, from briefing, scoping and scheduling through to review cycles, quality control and delivery
Confidence steering agencies, freelancers and production partners, including partner selection, ways of working and performance management
Command of Adobe Creative Cloud and current production, video and digital asset management technologies, together with creative operations and workflow tools
Openness to adopting new technologies, including AI-assisted creative production, to improve productivity
Excellent communication and stakeholder management capabilities, with a collaborative mindset and strong operational discipline
University degree or equivalent professional qualification in design, visual communication, art direction, marketing or a similar field
Fluent in English; additional languages are an advantage in a multi-market environment
We offer you
An agile, stable and internationally renowned family business
A modern, state-of-the-art workplace at Maison Davidoff, with a fully equipped cafeteria and garden, and only a few minutes' walk from Basel main station, including numerous catering options nearby
A dynamic and multi-cultural working environment with modern tools
Attractive working conditions, such as flexible working hours; and up to two weekly home office days (provided the respective position allows); five weeks of holidays per year
Attractive employee discounts for our products