Director of Customer Engagement and Retention

Overview

The Business of Fashion is seeking a strategic, commercially minded and member-obsessed Director of Customer Engagement & Retention. Your primary mission is to maximise member lifetime value by driving frequency of usage, building lasting member habits and reducing both voluntary and involuntary churn across the entire BoF Professional portfolio, including Individual, Executive and Student memberships. You will embed engagement-by-design principles across every product, editorial and marketing touchpoint. This role requires a "Right Brain, Left Brain" approach: combining genuine empathy for our members with rigorous, data-led decision-making and full-lifecycle technological optimisation.

Who we are:

The Business of Fashion is recognised around the world for its authoritative, analytical point of view on the global fashion and beauty industries. Our mission: to open, inform and connect the global fashion and beauty industries.

Serving members in more than 125 countries, The Business of Fashion combines independent, agenda-setting journalism with practical business advice, online learning, career-building tools and immersive events, powering positive change in fashion and the wider world.

Over time, our pioneering approach has made BoF the fashion industry’s leading source of business intelligence, and one of its most respected and influential voices, simply because you won’t find BoF’s original reporting, analysis and advice anywhere else. The Business of Beauty brings the same kind of agenda-setting coverage to the beauty and wellness space. Today, our talented team of correspondents, editors, analysts, engineers, designers, marketers and more numbers more than 100 people in London, New York, Paris and Milan.

Commitment to Diversity

BoF is committed to building a diverse workforce and we are proud to be an Equal Opportunities employer. All applicants and employees receive equal treatment regardless of race, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation, gender, age, disability, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity.

Commitment to Inclusivity

BoF is committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work and reach their full potential within their roles using a growth mindset. We are committed to creating an inclusive culture for our employees globally.

Commitment to Accessibility

BoF is committed to providing an accessible environment for all applicants throughout any stage of the recruitment process, by removing any barriers to ensure we offer a process that gives all of our applicants an opportunity to shine.

We are committed to supporting candidates with visible or non-visible disabilities, including neurodiversity (eg: autism, ADHD, dyslexia) or mental health conditions. We will work with you to understand what adjustments you may need in the recruitment process to ensure you are able to perform at your best and we want to create a safe space to support this. Should you require any particular adjustment to be made, please let the Talent Acquisition Specialist who is managing your application know when you are contacted for an interview, so we can consider how best we can support you with this.

What We Need You To Do

Leading a small team spanning lifecycle marketing you will own, develop and execute the strategy to engage, retain and grow the value of our existing members: the fashion and beauty professionals who power the creative economy and shape global culture. You will be the voice of the members across the business.

• Strategic Retention Leadership: Champion the strategic hypothesis that frequency of usage is the primary mechanism for building member habits and de-risking the business from AI-driven displacement and translate it into a retention-first roadmap that delivers ambitious lifetime value, tenure and churn targets.
• Engagement Council: Establish and chair the Engagement Council, aligning decentralised initiatives across Editorial, Product, Data and Marketing into a single, prioritised strategy that balances future-state ambition with immediate goals.
• Engagement-by-Design: Partner with Product and Editorial to shape product development and UX that increase frequency of usage and value perception, owning the associated test and development roadmap.
• Lifecycle Strategy & Segmentation: Define audience segmentation and omnichannel lifecycle strategies across the full member journey: onboarding (first 30 days), nurture, intensive care for at-risk cohorts, advocacy and upsell, and save/win-back. Drive early progression towards high-habit actions such as signing up to "The Daily Digest" and downloading the BoF app.
• Churn Mitigation & Payment Success: Act as the business owner of the Recurly relationship, partnering with Finance and Product to salvage revenue lost to failed payments through automated dunning, smart retries and payment-failure communications. Oversee targeted cancel/save flows and re-activation campaigns that increase save rates and deflect low-intent cancellations.
• Product Portfolio Management: Drive engagement, retention and value across diverse tiers, including:
  - BoF Professional for Individuals: Standard "Fashion & Beauty", and subsequent membership packages launched.
  - BoF Professional for Executives: Deepening engagement and tenure among premium, high-level decision-makers.
  - BoF Professional for Students: Building habits that retain "Student+" members and convert them into long-term professional members as their careers progress.

• Data & Technology Mastery: Define the technical requirements for our engagement engine (including Braze and Recurly), activate zero- and first-party member data to deliver hyper-personalised, role-based content and recommendations, and use AI-driven agentic workflows and predictive analytics to power next best actions.
•  Commercial Performance: Own engagement and retention performance, partnering with Data and Finance on lifetime value modelling, forecasting and revenue recovery, ensuring clear KPIs are agreed and shared with all stakeholders. Manage the allocated budget and third-party supplier relationships cost-effectively.
• Test & Learn Culture: Embed continuous testing and optimisation across messaging, copy, offers and channel delivery, fostering an analytical culture where every decision considers ROI and lifetime value.
• Lead a high performance team: Demonstrating high levels of EQ, you will line manage individual contributors and people managers, using radical candor to manage through change while driving high levels of performance and engagement.

Who You Are

You will have a proven track record in a senior retention, lifecycle, or CRM leadership role within a subscription or membership-based business (preferably in digital media or SaaS). You will be an expert in lifecycle strategy, marketing automation and member experience, and you confidently use data to understand what members value, why they leave and how to keep them.

Experience & Technical Proficiency

• Strategic Vision & Hypothesis Testing: Proven ability to define and champion retention-first strategies, such as frequency loops and habit formation, that measurably increase member lifetime value.
• Lifecycle Strategy & Churn Mitigation: Advanced expertise in predictive audience segmentation, omnichannel lifecycle orchestration and designing targeted save, win-back and re-activation interventions.
• MarTech Architecture & Activation: Expertise in defining technical requirements for engagement engines and translating data capabilities into deployed omnichannel journeys, with strong working knowledge of ESPs such as Braze and subscription billing platforms such as Recurly.
• Commercial Acumen & Performance Modelling: Highly proficient in lifetime value modelling and forecasting, and in partnering with Finance on revenue recovery and payment success.
• AI & Agentic Workflow Integration: Understanding of how to leverage ML-driven agents and predictive analytics for hyper-personalised next best actions, alongside a clear strategy for capturing and activating zero- and first-party member data.
• Cross-functional Leadership: Strong executive presence with the ability to chair cross-functional councils and work across a matrix structure, bridging the "Missions" (B2C, B2B) and "Functions" (Product, Data, Technology, Editorial).
• Constructive Collaborator: Excellent stakeholder management skills, acting as an advisor to internal teams while boldly and constructively challenging the status quo.
• Substance with Style: Ability to deliver polished, sophisticated member communications that reflect the BoF brand essence while delivering practical, measurable results.
• Exceptional written English: Strong copywriting and proofreading skills, with experience writing engaging copy for an existing subscriber base across online and offline channels.

Job Complexity & Discretion

• A strategic, battle-tested leader: who collaborates with other leaders at BoF to establish strategic plans and objectives and makes final decisions on operational matters within their remit.
• A seasoned problem solver: capable of working on complex issues that require an in-depth evaluation of variable factors and a deep knowledge of BoF, participating in company-level development of methods, techniques and evaluation criteria.
•  An influential operator: who regularly interacts with the Senior Leadership Team and our community, negotiates and influences on matters of significance to BoF, and sits as part of the extended leadership team, understanding that decisions in this role have a serious impact on the success of the Mission and company.
• A people leader: who manages individual contributors and people managers, with responsibility for hiring and budget and greater independence from their head of function, developing a leadership style that reflects BoF’s core values.

Core Competencies

In line with the BoF Competency Framework, this role requires Advanced proficiency in the following role-specific competencies, alongside the Leading Self and Leading Others leadership competencies:

• Analytical Thinking: Predicts future behaviours and outcomes using modelling, and formulates well-judged hypotheses to interrogate member data for insight.
• Business Strategy: Fosters a strategic view to address complex business issues and establishes clear expectations and outcomes based on organisational strategy.
• Collaboration: Engages the right people early, within and beyond organisational boundaries, and readily shares lessons learned and credit.
• Problem Solving: Proactively anticipates and prevents problems, guiding corrective action on complex issues that cross organisational boundaries.
• Strategic Product Planning: Defines prioritisation criteria and recommends core components of the product plan that support engagement and retention.
• Technical Knowledge: Manages complex scenarios requiring internal and external input, including data privacy and consumer regulation, and leads on policy and process improvements.

You’ll Know You’re Successful When…

• A retention-first, full-lifecycle engagement strategy has been established, aligned through the Engagement Council and is being executed across Product, Editorial and Marketing
• There are clear goals and robust KPIs (including lifetime value, tenure, active member rate, voluntary and involuntary churn, save rate and CSAT/NPS) agreed with Data and Finance and reported transparently
• Members are using BoF more often, with measurable improvements in onboarding progression and frequency of usage
• Revenue lost to failed payments is being recovered and involuntary churn is falling
• Customer Engagement and Retention is operating as a proactive retention function, with Customer insight regularly shaping decisions across the business