D2C & Consumer Brand Recruitment
Fast moving brands need people who can own a number without a playbook. We look for ownership and comfort with ambiguity, not just a familiar logo on the CV.
Why brand-name pedigree misleads in D2C
The same job title describes two completely different people.
Someone who ran paid social at a large consumer company had a large budget, an agency executing, a brand that people already searched for, and a analytics team answering questions. Someone who ran paid social at a young D2C brand had a small budget, built the creative themselves, and found out within a week whether it worked because the money was visibly gone.
Both CVs say performance marketing. Only one of them has done the job you are hiring for. We screen for what someone owned and what happened when it went wrong, rather than where they did it.
The search where the role did not exist
A bakery products brand wanted one person strong in both e-commerce and quick commerce.
30+ screened
Nobody had both. Not a sourcing failure, a fact about the market.
5 shared
After the brief was renegotiated on the basis of the screening data.
2 weeks
Start to close, including the conversation that changed the requirement.
E-commerce and quick commerce look adjacent from the outside. In practice they are different disciplines with different rhythms, and founders hiring for consumer brands routinely assume one person covers both. Thirty-odd profiles in, it was clear that at this budget that person did not exist.
So we went back to the client with the screening data in a sheet, and asked for a budget increase and a change of requirement. That is a harder conversation than continuing to send near-misses, and it is the one worth having. Evidence, not opinion, and it took two weeks rather than two months.
Then the part that matters. The candidate who joined had strong e-commerce experience. Quick commerce appeared nowhere on his CV. Not once. What his CV did show was agency experience, and among that agency's clients was an FMCG brand. That was worth a phone call, and the phone call found real quick-commerce exposure.
No keyword filter would have surfaced him. No boolean string, no ATS, no search on the term itself, because the term was not in the document. He was found by reading a client list, making an inference, and picking up the phone. Software narrows the field. A recruiter who is actually curious closes it, and that is why a human signs off on every shortlist we send.
Roles we hire for
Growth & marketing
- Performance marketing and paid media
- Growth and retention
- CRM and lifecycle
- Content, social and influencer
Category & brand
- Category management
- Brand management
- Product and merchandising
- Pricing and revenue
Operations & supply chain
- Supply chain and planning
- Warehousing and fulfilment
- Procurement and vendor management
- Quality and sourcing
Leadership
- Founder's office and chief of staff
- Business unit and P&L leadership
- Head of growth, head of brand
- Operations leadership
Screening for ambiguity tolerance
Comfort with ambiguity is treated as a personality trait and interviewed for with hypotheticals, which candidates learn to answer. We interview it as history instead: a specific time the plan was wrong, what they did in the first week after realising, and what they would do differently. The answers separate people quickly, and they are hard to rehearse.
Every shortlist includes a written view on fit with reservations included. You get an honest read, not a sales pitch.
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Let's talk about the role
Tell us what you are hiring for and we will come back within one working day with a view on the market, a realistic timeline, and whether we are the right firm for it.