Director, Customer Engagement & Retention

About this role

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,…