Co-Founder (Brand, Marketing & Community)

THE PROBLEM

For most of art history, the commission was the relationship. A patron backed an artist directly, took a risk on their vision, and in return got something no one else in the world would ever own. That relationship built the Renaissance, and it deserves to be celebrated on those terms. We believe there's yet to be a 21st century Renaissance, and the reason is simple: that relationship has never had a modern way in, one considered and trustworthy enough to match what it's worth.

Otterkin exists to do that: to take a relationship worth celebrating and give it the clarity, accessibility, and craft of a modern platform, without losing what made it matter in the first place. We're first to market in fine art commissioning, connecting collectors and patrons with living artists for bespoke work, and being first means there's no existing playbook and no inherited brand for anyone to step into. Nobody yet knows what it looks or sounds like to be a serious, trustworthy home for patronage in this century, because no one has built it properly yet.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE, 12-18 MONTHS OUT

• Otterkin is recognised as the reference point in art commissioning — the platform people mean when they describe the category, not one option among several.
• Patrons, artists, and galleries each have a visible, active community around the platform, not just a transactional relationship with it.
• The brand reads as luxury-credible on sight — visual identity, tone, and product experience all cohere, with nothing that reads as a fintech skin over an art idea.
• Every touchpoint a patron, artist, or gallery has with Otterkin — not just the marketing surfaces — reinforces the same trust the brand is asking for.

WHAT THIS ROLE OWNS

• Brand and identity — visual direction and tone of voice, founded from nothing, across the platform, marketing, and partner-facing materials.
• Marketing — strategy and execution for patron and artist acquisition, and positioning as Otterkin expands into galleries, developers, hospitality, and councils.
• Community — ownership of the artist, patron, and gallery communities as living relationships, not acquisition funnels; the connective tissue between people brought onto the platform and people who stay.
• Customer experience — the end-to-end feel of interacting with Otterkin, on the understanding that brand is expressed through every interaction, not only the ones that look like marketing.

This is a broader remit than "brand and marketing." It's ownership of how it feels to be a patron, artist, or gallery dealing with Otterkin, start to finish.

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU

This is a hands-on seat, and it is also a strategic one — the role holds both at once. You set the direction and you execute it yourself; there is no team downstream to hand the work to by default. That means:

• You can write copy that holds up against Frieze, Apartamento, or a well-edited founder's letter, not agency-standard marketing prose.
• You can art-direct and execute visual work, not just brief it.
• You can build a campaign, a launch, a partnership activation from concept through to delivery, without a studio behind you.
• You think in positioning and strategy, but you don't stop there — you ship the asset.
• You think about community and experience as things you own, not things a support function handles downstream of you.

We will ask you to produce actual work as part of the interview process. This is not a formality. The ability to make things, not just direct their making, is the qualifying bar for this role.

What's non-negotiable, and what isn't: We know that strategy, brand-building, copywriting, campaign execution, community ownership, and hands-on asset production rarely sit at equal strength in one person. Two things are genuinely non-negotiable:

• Fluency in the language of the art world. This person has to know, instinctively, what lands with patrons, artists, and galleries. That fluency can't be trained in on a timeline the business has.
• Hands-on production. In the early stage, this person makes the assets themselves in collaboration with the existing cofounders. There is no studio to hand work to yet, so the work has to come from us directly.

Everything else — deep campaign strategy, community infrastructure, breadth of channel expertise — is valuable but not the bar for this hire. The intention is to bring in support or a dedicated hire against those areas once the brand foundation this person builds is strong enough to hand pieces of it off. This person is being hired to find the voice and make it real, not to run a full marketing department on day one.

CANDIDATE PROFILE

Our ideal candidate is: someone who has run accounts within the art world — a gallery, an auction house, an art advisory, an art-adjacent luxury brand — or who carries a genuine, demonstrable personal engagement with the art world independent of their professional background.

The archetype: account-side talent from a small-to-mid-sized agency. At that scale, account people are generalists by necessity — they hold strategic positioning and hands-on execution at once, because there's no one else to hand it to. That range is exactly what this role requires.

Also strong: someone who has worked in-house in marketing, particularly at a smaller or leaner organisation where the same generalist range applies — strategy and production sitting with the same person, out of necessity rather than by design.

What we're avoiding: candidates whose formative experience is at large agencies or large in-house marketing functions, where creative work is routed to specialists or outsourced by default. That environment trains people to direct rather than do. We need the opposite instinct.

WHY EQUITY, WHY NOW?

This is offered as a co-founder seat because the scope of ownership warrants it, rather than a marketing manager title with founder aspirations attached. The right person is solving the trust problem a first-to-market category has by definition, for three audiences at once, with no existing playbook and no inherited direction to work from.