Location: Markham, Ontario
Job Description:
Position: Creative Director
Type: Full-Time | Hybrid
Location: Markham, ON
Reports to: Vice President, Marketing
About Us
Pet Valu is Canada’s leading pet specialty retailer, dedicated to strengthening the bond between dedicated pet lovers and their pets. With 50 years of animal care expertise, we operate over 800 stores across Canada under several banners, including Pet Valu, Bosley’s, Total Pet, Paulmac's Pet, Tisol & Chico. Guided by our mission to deliver products, care, expertise, and memorable moments, Pet Valu is a place where people build meaningful careers while making a positive impact on pets and communities.
What will you do?
The Creative Director is the senior creative leader responsible for defining how the Pet Valu portfolio of brands looks, sounds, and shows up across the customer journey. Reporting to the Vice President, Marketing, this role establishes the creative vision, brand architecture, tone of voice, identity systems, and creative standards required to build distinctive brands customers recognize, trust, and love.
The Creative Director will build and lead a modern in-house creative capability spanning art direction, design, copy, content, production, and creative operations. The role translates brand strategy, customer insights, and commercial priorities into compelling ideas and customer experiences across campaigns, media, social, digital, loyalty communications, in-store signage, new store openings, community programs, and other customer-facing touchpoints.
As Pet Valu’s creative authority, this leader combines exceptional creative judgment with strong enterprise and franchisee partnership. The Creative Director raises the quality and consistency of the work, creates effective ways of working with internal teams and external partners, and ensures creative ideas can be executed successfully across corporate and franchised stores.
Responsibilities:
Brand Architecture, Identity & Voice
- Define and evolve the brand architecture for Pet Valu and its portfolio of banners, clarifying the role, relationship, positioning, and expression of each brand.
- Establish and steward the brand identity system, including visual identity, tone of voice, design principles, photography, illustration, motion, sonic and verbal expression, and other distinctive brand assets.
- Translate brand strategy and customer value propositions into clear creative platforms and enduring brand codes that build recognition, relevance, and emotional connection.
- Develop practical brand standards, playbooks, templates, and governance that enable consistent application across teams, agencies, franchisees, channels, and customer touchpoints.
- Serve as the enterprise creative authority, providing clear direction and resolving questions about brand expression and creative quality.
Creative Vision & Direction
- Set the overarching creative vision and standard for enterprise campaigns, always-on content, customer communications, retail experiences, and key growth initiatives.
- Lead concept development and creative direction from brief through production, ensuring ideas are distinctive, strategically grounded, channel-appropriate, and executable.
- Provide senior art and copy direction across advertising, media, social, video, digital, CRM and loyalty communications, content, PR, experiential, and in-store channels.
- Translate customer insights, merchandising priorities, and business objectives into compelling creative ideas that influence priority customer behaviours and support customer growth.
- Present and advocate for creative work with senior leaders and business partners, clearly explaining the strategic rationale and expected customer impact.
Build the In-House Creative Capability
- Build the mandate, structure, talent plan, and phased roadmap for a high-performing in-house creative team.
- Recruit, lead, coach, and develop multidisciplinary talent across art direction, graphic design, copywriting, content, production, and creative operations.
- Define which capabilities and work should be delivered in-house versus through agencies, production partners, freelancers, and specialist resources.
- Establish clear roles, career paths, standards, and feedback practices that strengthen craft, accountability, collaboration, and creative ambition.
- Create a culture where strong ideas, constructive challenge, customer empathy, commercial awareness, and continuous learning are expected.
Integrated Campaigns, Content & Customer Experience
- Partner with Integrated Marketing, Media, Social, PR, Loyalty, E-Commerce, Merchandising, and Operations to shape creative strategies and connected customer experiences.
- Lead creative development for national and local campaigns, seasonal events, product and service launches, loyalty initiatives, new store openings, and community programs.
- Establish a content and storytelling approach that creates more relevant, useful, and engaging work across paid, owned, earned, digital, and in-store channels.
- Ensure creative platforms can flex effectively by audience, channel, market, banner, and local need without diluting the core brand idea.
- Champion an omnichannel perspective so the brand feels coherent while the creative is optimized for the role of each customer touchpoint.
Retail, Franchisee & In-Store Creative Leadership
- Lead the creative direction and standards for in-store signage, point-of-purchase materials, customer communications, merchandising programs, and physical brand experiences.
- Build trusted relationships with Franchise Operations, franchisees, and store teams, seeking input early and incorporating operational realities into creative solutions.
- Bring a franchisee-first mindset to creative planning by developing work that is clear, locally relevant, practical to execute, and effective in driving customer response.
- Create scalable tools, templates, and systems that protect brand consistency while enabling appropriate local adaptation across corporate and franchised stores.
- Partner with operational teams to improve signage hierarchy, production quality, installation simplicity, and the overall customer experience in-store.
Creative Operations, Governance & Agency Ecosystem
- Design efficient end-to-end creative workflows covering intake, briefing, prioritization, resourcing, development, review, approval, production, versioning, and asset management.
- Establish clear creative briefing and decision-making standards that improve strategic clarity, reduce rework, and protect time for high-value creative development.
- Manage the creative agency and production ecosystem, ensuring partners complement internal capability and deliver strong quality, value, and speed.
- Oversee creative and production budgets, resource allocation, timelines, and vendor performance.
- Ensure creative work meets brand, legal, accessibility, production, and quality requirements.
Creative Effectiveness & Innovation
- Partner with Marketing, Loyalty, Media, and Analytics teams to define the role of creative in influencing customer behaviour and campaign performance.
- Use qualitative and quantitative learning to assess creative effectiveness, strengthen future briefs, and improve the work without reducing creative judgment to short-term metrics alone.
- Establish a disciplined test-and-learn approach for creative variables, formats, messages, and content.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-enabled creative tools and new production methods, to improve speed, scale, accessibility, and creative quality while protecting brand integrity.
- Build external inspiration and creative intelligence into the team’s practices, keeping Pet Valu relevant without following trends indiscriminately.
Qualifications:
Required
- Bachelor’s degree in Design, Advertising, Communications, Marketing, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
- 12+ years of progressive creative experience, with significant leadership responsibility in an in-house creative organization, agency, or both.
- A strong portfolio demonstrating brand-building ideas and integrated creative work across retail, digital, social, content, media, CRM, and physical environments.
- Proven experience defining or evolving brand architecture, identity systems, tone of voice, creative platforms, and enterprise brand standards.
- Demonstrated success building, transforming, or scaling multidisciplinary creative teams and operating models.
- Exceptional creative judgment and the ability to provide clear, actionable art, copy, and experience direction.
- Experience leading complex, high-volume creative portfolios while balancing brand ambition, commercial priorities, speed, and operational realities.
- Strong executive communication and influencing skills, including the ability to present creative strategy and advocate for ideas with senior stakeholders.
- Experience managing agencies, production partners, budgets, and creative technology or workflow investments.
Preferred
- Experience in retail, franchise, multi-site, or omnichannel environments.
- Experience leading creative for a portfolio of brands or banners.
- Bilingualism in English and French.
Compensation:
The targeted salary range for this position is $145,000.00 - $175,000.00. The final offer will be based on factors such as market location, relevant skills, experience and internal equity.
Ready to join the team?
We’re looking for passionate people who bring strong skills and live our core values of safety, compassion, expertise, and efficiency every day. If you’re energized by doing meaningful work, taking pride in what you deliver, and making a real impact for pets, people, and communities, you’ll feel right at home here. Join us and build a career where purpose, care, and excellence come together - because love lives here™.
Why work for us?
At Pet Valu, our people are at the heart of everything we do. We’re passionate about creating an environment where you feel supported, included, and empowered to grow - both personally and professionally. Some of the perks of working with us include:
- Hybrid, Flexible Work Options
- Comprehensive health and dental benefits
- Employee Share Purchase Plan with company matching
- Learning and Development support tailored to you
- An inclusive, collaborative culture where your voice matters
- Fun company events that keep us connected
- Preferred rates for car rentals, hotels, phone plans and gym discounts
- Generous employee discounts on our products
Pet Valu is an equal opportunity employer committed to inclusion and accessibility. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the recruitment and selection process, in accordance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).
At Pet Valu, we are committed to transparency and fairness in our hiring practices. This posting is for an existing vacancy. Pet Valu may use AI enabled technology to assist in the recruitment process for positions. The use of AI helps us ensure we are providing an equitable and streamlined recruitment experience for all applicants. While AI tools support our recruitment process, all decisions throughout the process are made exclusively by Pet Valu’s hiring team. At no stage does AI determine recruitment outcomes.
