Director of Growth Marketing

Director of Growth Marketing - Portland, Oregon 

Reports to: Founder/CEO

Compensation: Competitive and based on experience and qualifications

Location & Schedule: Onsite, Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM.

Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO

About the Role

Portland Gear is hiring a Director of Growth Marketing to own the full system connecting customer acquisition, retention, creative, conversion, and profitability. This is a broader growth leadership role, with the opportunity to shape the entire customer journey rather than focusing on a single marketing channel. You will build and lead an integrated growth strategy that drives sustainable revenue growth while protecting contribution margin.

You'll manage media buyers, agencies, and internal contributors while maintaining clear accountability for business outcomes. The right person moves comfortably between financial planning, performance analysis, creative strategy, and hands-on execution.

About Portland Gear

Portland Gear is a Portland-born brand built around a simple idea: life is better when the journey is shared. Founded in 2014 by Portland native Marcus Harvey, the company started with a small collection of DIY hats and T-shirts inspired by hometown pride and has grown into a globally recognized brand creating thoughtfully designed travel bags, apparel, and everyday essentials.

Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, Portland Gear combines style, function, and a genuine sense of connection to create products made for wherever life takes you, from everyday adventures around town to once-in-a-lifetime trips. Today, the brand continues to design products in Portland with the goal of connecting people to the places and people they love.

Our growth and commitment to building something meaningful have earned recognition along the way. This year alone, Portland Gear was named one of the Top 100 Places to Work by Oregon Business Journal, recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies, and honored with a 2026 Good Housekeeping Travel Award, among many other honors and recognitions.

At Portland Gear, we believe the products we create are about more than what you carry or wear. They become part of the stories, experiences, and relationships that make life meaningful. We’re building a brand that celebrates adventure, community, and togetherness, with deep roots in Portland and an outlook that reaches far beyond it.

What You'll Own

Customer acquisition — Own paid strategy across Meta, Google, and emerging channels. Manage media buyers and agencies against acquisition cost, incrementality, and blended business performance — not platform ROAS alone.

Revenue & margin planning — Build channel-level revenue plans, translate targets into traffic and spending requirements, and forecast contribution margin after advertising, discounts, COGS, fulfillment, and returns.

Creative testing — Build a repeatable system for generating, launching, and evaluating creative. Translate data and customer insights into briefs, identify winners, and manage fatigue and iteration.

Retention & lifecycle — Own email, SMS, loyalty, and lifecycle strategy. Improve repeat-purchase rate, LTV, and returning-customer revenue across the full customer journey.

Forecasting & promotions — Build rolling forecasts, coordinate a promotional calendar across channels, model margin impact before approvals, and conduct post-promotion analysis.

Team & partner leadership — Set clear expectations for media buyers, agencies, and internal contributors. Build operating rhythms, improve processes, and recommend when to hire, outsource, or automate.

Executive reporting — Lead a weekly growth review covering revenue, margin, acquisition, retention, conversion, and forecast accuracy. Maintain a concise scorecard with accountable owners.

Growth experimentation - Build a disciplined experimentation program across acquisition, merchandising, pricing, promotions, landing pages, lifecycle, and customer experience. Prioritize initiatives by expected business impact and learning velocity

What Success Looks Like at 12 Months

In the first 90 days, you will audit the growth system, establish a unified scorecard, validate channel and contribution-margin economics, clarify partner accountability, and present a prioritized 12-month growth roadmap. Reliable revenue and margin forecasting in place. Improved new-customer acquisition efficiency. A repeatable creative-testing pipeline. Higher website conversion through a prioritized roadmap. Stronger returning-customer revenue. A coordinated promotional process grounded in margin impact. Clear accountability across all growth partners.

Qualifications

• 10 years in ecommerce, growth, or performance marketing
• 5 years leading growth strategy, teams, or agencies
• Experience scaling a DTC or omnichannel business to $50M
• Strong command of Meta Ads, Google Ads, paid economics, and attribution
• Experience managing significant monthly ad budgets
• Solid understanding of contribution margin, CAC, LTV, and ecommerce financials
• Proven ability to build forecasts and communicate performance clearly
• Experience managing agencies, media buyers, and creative partners

Preferred

Shopify, Triple Whale, Klaviyo experience

Apparel, accessories, or lifestyle brand background

Familiarity with testing and attribution limitations

Experience in a founder-led or entrepreneurial environment

The Person

You're equal parts strategist, operator, analyst, and leader. You know that growth isn't synonymous with spending more. You understand how acquisition, creative, retention, conversion, and margin work together, and you can hold a team accountable for executing against that system. You care about profitable, durable growth and thrive in a business that is evolving and always changing. 

If you’re excited by a brand with a strong point of view, products designed with purpose, and work that helps people connect with each other and the world around them, we’d love to hear from you.