Chief Marketing Officer DTC (Founding, Equity-Only)

About Origin & Story

Origin & Story is a specialty coffee subscription that features a different roaster every month. One curated experience. We exist to enrich people's relationship with coffee, to make it deeper, more informed, and more connected to the people behind it. We are building a community of patrons who back world-class roasters.

Subscribers receive curated coffee from that month's roaster, the documentary film we produce in their space, and the brew guides the roasters walk them through on camera. They also get the Brew Lab, a daily brewing companion that helps them dial in every bag at home. We are building the most complete and cohesive coffee subscription experience. One roaster at a time. No marketplace.

We are self-funded, early stage, and cash flow positive with hundreds of paying subscribers. Direct competitors at millions to hundreds of millions in annual revenue have ordered from us to study what we are building. The ambition is to scale this the right way.

The Role

We are hiring a Chief Marketing Officer to own how Origin & Story is presented to the world and how we grow. Social media is our primary marketing channel and where the brand gets built. You set the overall marketing strategy: positioning, narrative, brand awareness, social-first content, campaign design, customer acquisition, lifecycle, retention, reactivation, and the operating rhythm. You have creative control and agency over how the brand shows up in market.

You and our Chief Brand Officer are peers. They hold the bar on craft, voice rules, packaging art direction, film direction, and the portal design system. You hold strategic intent: what gets made, why, and how it sequences into market. When you concept a campaign, they design and build it. Neither outranks the other. Origin & Story competes for attention in the same cultural surface as the most interesting consumer brands of the last decade. The bar is set on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Paid acquisition is paused today, so excellence in social, organic, launches, partner-led demand, brand awareness, and lifecycle is the job until we responsibly turn paid back on. Responsibly means three things: first-box retention has improved against a defined threshold, contribution margin supports the spend, and we have a credible plan to measure incrementality.

You work directly with the founder on the biggest bets and partner closely with our Head of Influencer and Creator Partnerships and business development.

What a month looks like

Weekly: review social signals, cohort and channel data, the experiment log, lifecycle health, and what subscribers tell us via cancellation reasons, NPS, and inbound.

Monthly: walk the cohort retention curve, pressure-test the drop sequence, run customer research or win-loss, scan competitors, and reset priorities. You hold the social editorial rhythm and content calendar across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube as our primary surface, deciding what we publish, in which mode (brand-led, creator-led, founder-led, employee-led, UGC), and toward which outcome. You hold the lifecycle rhythm across Klaviyo (welcome, onboarding, renewal, save, dunning, reactivation, win-back, drop sequences) as the retention engine that compounds what social brought in. You concept campaigns with the CBO. Volume spikes around monthly roaster drops.

What you own

• Marketing strategy and brand presentation: the overall thesis for how Origin & Story acquires, converts, retains, reactivates, and grows brand awareness, plus how we present across every market-facing surface. Positioning, narrative, quarterly priority stack.
• Social media, organic, and brand awareness: native social strategy across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. Editorial calendar, content modes, drop content arcs, trend response, PR and earned media, referral and gifting. This is our number one channel.
• Campaign design and creative direction: concept, narrative arc, channel mix, sequencing, and the strategic brief that becomes creative work. You and the CBO collaborate; they hold the bar on visual craft.
• Launch and drop campaigns: the full arc of each month's roaster story across pre-launch warming, launch-day execution, and post-launch retention.
• Creator and affiliate program (with Head of Influencer): calendar fit, attribution standards, gifted seeding versus paid partnerships, whitelisting, commercial framing.
• Retention marketing: end-to-end lifecycle in Klaviyo, save and pause/skip/swap, dunning, reactivation and win-back, cohort reviews (D0, D30, D60), an early-churn lens on first-to-second-box conversion as our existential metric.
• Market and customer research: qualitative voice of customer, cohort and channel analysis, competitive landscape, win-loss.
• Paid readiness: the brief for when and how to resume paid, experiment design (holdouts, geo, incrementality), MER and payback guardrails, contractor or agency selection.

Shared with the Chief Brand Officer

You and the CBO operate as creative peers. Neither outranks the other in this zone.

• Campaign creative direction: you concept narrative and intent; CBO designs, art directs, produces.
• Social content aesthetic: you set editorial direction; CBO holds visual identity.
• Drop creative concepts: the look, voice, and arc of each monthly roaster launch.
• Brand voice in marketing copy: CBO holds the rules; you write and steer within them.
• Visual identity decisions in market: CBO has final authority; you are a real voice.

What this seat does not own

• Hands-on craft production: design system upkeep, layouts, resized cuts, Canva work. CBO and our creative bench build the work you concept and brief.
• Corporate B2B sales and wholesale contracting. BD owns that pipeline.
• In-house edit and post-production. Our creative bench produces documentary and brew guide work.
• Influencer outreach and contracting. Head of Influencer and Creator Partnerships owns that pipeline.

Requirements

• Modern DTC operator at scale: you have been a marketing leader (CMO, VP Marketing, GM, Head of Growth, Head of Brand) at a notable modern DTC brand that broke through on brand and social. Think Liquid Death, Rhode, Olipop, Poppi, Glossier, Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Vuori, Cuts, Our Place, Necessaire, Fly By Jing, Caraway, Jolie, Hexclad, or peer-class brands at meaningful revenue in the post-iOS14, TikTok-native, creator-economy era. We are not hiring operators whose last frontline DTC seat predates the modern playbook.
• Social media marketing depth: deep fluency across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and the cultural surfaces that move people right now. You brief into platform algorithms, not against them. You know when brand-led, creator-led, employee-led, founder-led, or UGC is correct. You treat comments and DMs as a brand surface. You have shipped social systems that compounded into awareness and demand. This is the number one capability we are hiring for.
• Marketing strategy and creative direction: you have been the accountable owner who set priorities, not executed someone else's playbook. You have shaped how a brand shows up in market and partnered with brand or creative leaders without losing creative agency. You write briefs creative teams can build from.
• DTC subscription or recurring revenue depth: you have owned marketing where renewal rate, first-to-second-box conversion, churn curve, save rate, or reactivation moved because of choices you made and measured. You speak in cohorts and understand LTV and CAC payback as decisions, not dashboards.
• Lifecycle and retention depth: fluent in Klaviyo-class ESP architecture, segmentation, A/B testing, deliverability, and honest attribution. SMS literacy (Attentive, Postscript) is a plus.
• Paid media literacy: you have directed paid before. You understand MER, payback, post-iOS14 attribution, incrementality, and the guardrails that keep creative velocity from collapsing quality.
• Tooling fluency: Shopify, native social analytics, UGC and creator platforms, Klaviyo, Recharge or comparable, an attribution platform you have used (Triple Whale, Northbeam, Rockerbox class), reviews, referral.
• Cross-functional credibility: credible peer to creative and brand, creator partnerships, and founders, without defaulting to "just run more ads."

Who succeeds here

• You think strategically about how the brand presents and grows, not only how lifecycle squeezes the cohort.
• You are creative enough to direct work and disciplined enough to ship it on time.
• You read customers as carefully as you read dashboards.
• You are honest in your attribution stories, especially with yourself.
• Bonus: curiosity about specialty coffee, roasting, and how people brew at home.

Compensation and Time Commitment

Full-time elsewhere is fine. Weekly hours sit in a part-time band until the company hits defined revenue targets. Remote.

Compensation is a profit interests grant of 5 to 10 percent of Origin & Story. The band reflects the caliber of the operator we hire. For the right person, we go to the top. Profit interests are the LLC equivalent of options, issued with a zero threshold based on the fair market value at grant date. Vesting is immediate monthly with no cliff. Repurchase rights on departure. Double-trigger acceleration on sale.

There is no founding-team salary today. Ordinary salary opens once Origin & Story reaches a defined revenue and profitability milestone in the near-term.

How to Apply

Apply through LinkedIn. In your note, share three things. One, your marketing strategy for one company (what changed in priorities, sequencing, channels, or lifecycle), tied to outcomes you can defend without inflating numbers. Two, one retention or lifecycle initiative you drove (what you measured, what shifted, how you knew it was you). Three, one sentence on why this seat fits a patronage-framed specialty coffee subscription, not a generic DTC growth role. We read every application.