Creative Director, Brand (Contract)

Nex is on a mission to help families rediscover the joy of movement. Created by parents for parents, Nex combines technology and play to deliver fun, social, and interactive experiences powered by natural body motion, encouraging kids and adults to move more, play more, and have fun together. Nex Playground, the company’s award-winning active play system, is purpose-built to get families moving year-round, with safety and privacy as core considerations in its intentional design. It is certified kidSAFE+ COPPA compliant and built to support healthy, active play for all ages and abilities. Nex Playground features a growing library of 50+ experiences, including motion and dance games, fitness and educational experiences, and Nex Originals. Content includes collaborations with partners like Hasbro, Sesame Workshop, and NBCUniversal. Nex has been recognized by Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, TIME’s Best Inventions, and Parents’ Best Entertainment System for Families, and has earned Red Dot, IDEA, and Core77 international design awards. We encourage you to explore Have Fun and Is Motion Gaming Back?, as they offer a deeper look into our culture, values, and explain how our approach to motion gaming differs from previous generations. To protect yourself from recruitment scams, please note that Nex communicates through official company emails ending in @nex.inc. If you receive a suspicious email or message, please do not respond and report it immediately to us. Location: Remote (US & Canada only) Annual salary: $180,000 - $210,000 USD (Final base salary within this range will be determined based on job-related factors, including the candidate’s experience, skills, qualifications, and geographic location) Type: 6 month contract with potential FTE conversion Reports to: VP of Design Nex has always been design-led. There's deep ex-Apple DNA on the team, and we make decisions from first principles rather than by copying whatever our competitors shipped last quarter. We’re looking for a Creative Director to raise the creative quality of everything Nex puts into the world. This is rare opportunity to help mold the creative organization’s culture and scale it up as the team grows. You’ll lead and develop our marketing creative team while remaining deeply involved in the work itself. You’ll help shape campaign concepts, establish creative direction, develop ideas, review work, and occasionally get your hands dirty when the work needs it. But your greatest impact will come from making the people and work around you better. You’ll take broad marketing and business objectives and turn them into creative work that people actually want to see. We’re not looking for someone who simply knows how to make polished advertising. We’re looking for someone who knows how to make great ideas. Someone who can recognize a genuinely original idea when they see it, push a good idea into a great one, and know when something isn’t good enough to ship. You should have a track record of creating campaigns that people remember, talk about, and share. What you’ll do Lead the creative • Own creative direction for Nex’s marketing campaigns and communications, from concept through launch. • Translate business objectives into compelling creative strategies and ideas. • Develop and challenge concepts, platforms, and campaign directions. • Push the team toward work that is distinctive, surprising, and memorable. • Set the creative vision and maintain it through execution. • Set and uphold a high creative bar across campaigns, paid media, social, retail, launches, and partnerships. • Know when work is good, great, or not ready to ship, and have the authority to redirect it when needed. Make the work • Stay close to the craft while empowering the team to execute. • Concept and pitch ideas; develop creative directions, mood boards, style frames, and visual approaches. • Art direct creative production across design, motion, illustration, photography, and other mediums. • Get hands-on in creative tools when useful. • Give clear, actionable feedback that materially improves the work. • Know when to step in and when to let the team own the execution. • Your job is to make sure the right idea gets made exceptionally well. Build a great creative team • Lead and develop our marketing creative team and future creative talent. • Coach creatives to strengthen craft, conceptual thinking, strategic judgment, and presentation skills. • Build a culture of candid critique, experimentation, high standards, and low ego. • Create an environment where people actively seek feedback and grow from it. • Hire thoughtfully and raise the caliber of the team as Nex grows. Make creative reviews better • Great creative teams don’t need more meetings - they need better ones. • Establish focused, efficient creative reviews with clear decision-making. • Help distinguish strategic feedback, creative feedback, and personal preference. • Build processes and rituals that enable speed without compromising quality. • Continuously improve how the team briefs, develops, reviews, and ships creative. Be a strategic partner • Collaborate with partners to turn business objectives into creative opportunities. • Challenge briefs and bring creative thinking into strategy early. • Identify opportunities to make Nex more culturally relevant and distinctive. • Present and defend creative thinking with confidence and clarity. • Balance creative ambition with audience needs, business goals, timelines, and resources. Build trust across Nex • Build strong relationships with senior partners. • Help non-creative stakeholders understand what makes creative effective. • Bring people along without letting consensus replace good creative judgment. • Be a thoughtful advocate for the work while staying pragmatic. • Become a trusted creative voice when the right answer isn’t obvious. What We’re Looking For We’re less interested in where you worked than in what you made. You might have worked at an agency. You might have built campaigns inside a consumer brand. You might have worked across entertainment, technology, fashion, media, culture, or something we haven’t thought of. What matters is that you’ve demonstrated an ability to make exceptional creative work. • 10+ years in design and creative, with real experience in creative direction for campaigns and multi-channel initiatives and leading teams. You've been a creative director or design lead somewhere the work was held to a high standard, and you've grown people while doing it. • Obsession with craft. You don't settle. You're still actively working on your own taste by following people whose work you admire, making things, paying attention. Excellent taste and attention to detail across typography, layout, color, and composition. • Strong conceptual thinking and the ability to translate strategy into compelling visual ideas. • You move fast without much oversight. We're small and resource-constrained. Ambiguity is normal and information is usually incomplete. We need someone who can get things moving anyway and be scrappy about it. • You take hard feedback well and give it clearly. Our culture involves direct critique in both directions. Being able to hear "this isn't good enough" without deflating, and say it to others without deflating them, is essential. • High curiosity; you see the world a little differently. In our experience that's the most reliable marker of a strong creative thinker. • You connect creative decisions to business outcomes like unit sales, retail performance, and market expansion. Taste matters, but so does the P&L. • Comfortable being hands-on. This isn't a role where you only review work. Some weeks you'll be in Figma, or writing copy, or redlining packaging artwork yourself. • Comfortable operating in a small, fast-moving environment with evolving priorities. • Strong sense of ownership and accountability for creative outcomes. • Passion for building a brand that is playful, distinctive, and emotionally resonant. What success looks like A year from now: • The work is better: Nex campaigns have more ambition, stronger ideas, sharper craft, and a distinctive creative point of view. • The ideas survive: Our strongest creative concepts remain strong as they move from pitch to production to launch instead of getting diluted along the way. • The team is stronger: Our creatives have developed better judgment, stronger craft, and more confidence in their ability to make great work. • Reviews are better: Creative reviews are faster, clearer, and more useful. The team spends more time making the work and less time navigating unnecessary process. • People come to you: Designers and marketers proactively seek your perspective because they know you have good taste, make the work better, and care about helping them succeed. • Partners trust your team: You’ve built a reputation for being a strategic partner who makes Marketing more effective, not simply a team that produces assets. • You can operate independently: The organization is able to make high-quality creative decisions without escalating every question. What This Role Is Not This isn’t a role for someone who primarily wants to manage. It’s not a role for someone who thinks creative leadership means having the final say on every decision. It’s not a role for someone who needs a large team or a big budget to create interesting work or be productive. And it’s not a role for someone whose definition of great creative is simply polished execution; we believe big ideas and strong concepts are how we connect meaningfully with the world. We’re looking for a creative leader who can raise the ambition of the work, develop the people making it, and build a creative organization capable of producing exceptional work consistently. Why Join Us? • Impact: Your work will directly influence our brand and how the world sees us. • Growth: Opportunities for professional growth and development. • Culture: A supportive and inclusive environment where your ideas matter. • Flexibility: We offer flexible working hours and remote work options to fit your lifestyle. We Offer • Competitive compensation package. • Flexible working hours and vacation policy. • Product-driven culture that treasures talents and individual growth. • Front-row seat and hands-on experience with cutting edge technologies in the evolving gaming field Nex is located in San Jose, California, USA and Hong Kong. Learn more about us at https://www.nexplayground.com/about. We encourage applications even if you don’t meet more than 50% of the requirements — we believe that experience comes in many forms! Nex is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. This policy applies to all individuals at every stage of the employment relationship, including all current and prospective employees, and covers all employment decisions including recruitment, hiring, job assignment, promotion, compensation, benefits, training, discipline and termination. We are committed to providing a workplace free from discrimination and harassment and to fostering an inclusive environment for all employees.