🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.

RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem. ⬇️ SEE EXAMPLE ⬇️

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HARRY’S TEARDOWN: amika is a Brooklyn-born, salon-raised haircare brand that has built something rare in prestige beauty: a product that actually works, a community that actually cares, and a business model that actually makes money.

The brand was born in salons — formulated by stylists, for stylists — and built its reputation the hard way: chair by chair, stylist by stylist, before ever touching a DTC pixel. Their products are powered by sea buckthorn, one of earth’s most omega-rich plant sources, and every formula is rooted in clinical results. This isn’t a vibe-driven beauty brand that looks good on Instagram but doesn’t do anything.

amika’s products perform.

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The US online perfume and cosmetic sales industry — the broader market amika operates in — generated $62.7 billion in revenue in 2025, with an 8.1% CAGR over the prior five years. That’s not a niche. That’s a massive, fast-growing market hiding behind a product category most people underestimate.

It’s true, the industry is projected to decelerate to a low-single-digit CAGR through 2030. The post-COVID ecommerce surge has been absorbed. The easy growth is over, and the next phase will require competing harder for a more saturated online buyer pool — which is exactly why amika needs a Director of Ecommerce who can operate at a practitioner level, not a strategist-on-paper level.

Here’s the tricky part that most beauty marketers miss: despite the industry’s heavy investment in Gen Z influencer marketing, TikTok campaigns, and youth-centric brand positioning, the 45-54 age cohort represents one of the largest revenue drivers in the online beauty market. Middle-aged buyers (35-54) collectively account for a disproportionately high share of total revenue — more than twice the combined share of the two youngest cohorts.

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The under-25 segment? It’s a fraction of that.

These buyers purchase more frequently, spend more per transaction, prioritize quality and efficacy over trend-chasing, and display higher brand loyalty. For a brand like amika — where the product actually delivers clinical results and commands a prestige price point — this is the sweet spot.

The structural economics are also favorable.

Online beauty retail carries higher profit margins than the broader retail sector, driven largely by a structural wage cost advantage: online sellers require far fewer employees than their brick-and-mortar counterparts, which permanently depresses one of retail’s largest cost lines. The critical pressure point is product input costs, which track close to the sector average. That means margin competition happens on labor, marketing, and technology — not sourcing.

The Director of Ecommerce who can automate customer service, use data for demand forecasting, drive repeat purchases to reduce CAC amortization, and close the mobile conversion gap has a direct line to margin improvement. amika, as its own manufacturer, already eliminates supplier power as a risk — a structural competitive advantage that most DTC brands would kill for.

amika’s buyer is a woman who has money, knows what works for her hair, and values substantive product education over aesthetic fluff. She’s prestige-oriented but not snobby about it. She cares about sustainability — amika is a certified B-Corp pledging Net Zero by 2030 — but she won’t compromise on performance to get it.

She probably discovered amika through her stylist, tried it in a salon, and now replenishes through DTC. She’s exactly the kind of customer you can build a compounding retention engine around: high purchase frequency, strong brand loyalty, and a willingness to try new products within the portfolio.

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The role itself sits at the intersection of strategy, operations, and execution.

You’ll own the DTC customer experience across loveamika.com and loveamika.ca — site merchandising, UX, SEO, CRO, promotional strategy, commercial planning, and platform operations on Shopify headless. You’ll lead a dev team and two direct reports (Site Operations Manager and Site Merchandising Manager).

You’ll partner with an AVP of Ecommerce, a Director of CRM, an Associate Director of CX, and cross-functional leaders in Marketing, Creative, Product Development, Planning, and Ops. This is a connective-tissue role — the person who makes the entire DTC engine hum by ensuring that marketing calendar moments translate into site experiences that actually convert.

The leadership team at amika has real depth.

This is a brand that grew up in salons, went DTC with discipline, earned B-Corp certification, and has navigated the post-COVID beauty landscape without losing its identity or its margins. The people running this business understand that DTC is not a marketing channel — it’s a full commercial system that requires strategic clarity, financial rigor, and operational discipline.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™

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ABOUT THE ROLE

The firm seeks a world-class Director of Ecommerce to own the DTC customer experience and ecommerce operations across its US and Canadian sites. In this role, your mission will be to …

1. Drive sales, conversion, and site performance by treating loveamika.com as a revenue engine with its own P&L discipline,
2. Translate amika’s brand storytelling and promotional strategy into site experiences that convert prestige beauty buyers, and
3. Build the operational infrastructure — site ops, platform enhancements, SEO, and merchandising systems — that allows the DTC channel to scale without breaking.

You will manage two direct reports and lead a development team, partnering cross-functionally across Marketing, CRM, Creative, Product Development, Planning, and Ops.

THIS IS NOT A TURNAROUND. amika is a healthy, growing brand with a strong product, a loyal customer base, and a leadership team that knows what it’s doing. This is a scale-and-optimize role for someone who wants to take a well-built DTC engine and make it significantly better.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™

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AREAS OF OVERSIGHT

DTC Strategy & Commercial Ownership

• Lead and execute amika’s DTC ecommerce strategy across loveamika.com and loveamika.ca, owning sales KPIs including conversion rate, AOV, and units per transaction — and treating each metric as a controllable lever tied to contribution margin, not just a dashboard number.
• Partner with the AVP of Ecommerce to build and manage the DTC promotional calendar as a revenue plan: each marketing moment (holiday GWP sets, seasonal launches, new product drops, exclusives) should have a projected revenue contribution, media support plan, and CRO strategy attached.
• Drive onsite execution of commercial strategy — including promotional cadence, evergreen programs, exclusives, gift-with-purchase, merchandising weight allocation, and seasonal events — ensuring that promotional and merchandising levers are optimized to achieve sales and margin targets.
• Contribute to annual planning and budgeting processes for ecommerce channel performance and operations, partnering with Site Ops, Sales, and Planning teams on monthly forecasts and revenue goals.

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Site Experience, Merchandising & CRO

• Own site merchandising strategy using a product portfolio framework — identifying champions, growth drivers, hidden gems, and underperformers — to allocate homepage real estate, PLP positioning, and promotional weight based on revenue impact and margin contribution, not just aesthetics.
• Partner with the Site Merchandising Manager and Paid Media team to optimize PDPs, PLPs, and homepage content based on performance data, funnel analytics, heatmap insights, and customer journey mapping — closing the gap between what looks beautiful and what actually converts.
• Run a structured CRO program grounded in quantitative analysis (GA4 purchase journey, device-level conversion gaps, landing page performance) and qualitative research (heatmaps, scroll maps, user recordings, post-purchase surveys, review mining) to identify and fix the biggest conversion leaks.
• Address the mobile conversion gap head-on: mobile carries the vast majority of DTC beauty traffic but converts at roughly half the desktop rate. Architect mobile-first experiences that deliver prestige product education and scent storytelling without sacrificing load speed or checkout simplicity.

SEO & Organic Discovery

• Partner with digital marketing on SEO strategy and execution across technical SEO (headless Shopify architecture introduces crawlability and indexing complexity that must be managed), content SEO (ingredient education, “best for” editorial content, category page optimization), and emerging answer-engine optimization (AEO) for AI-powered search surfaces.
• Ensure amika’s DTC experience is discoverable, competitive, and aligned with brand positioning in a market where barriers to entry are low and organic discovery is one of the few compounding, owned-demand channels available.
• Champion the SEO-CRO intersection: pages optimized for search must also convert — not just rank. Landing pages must serve both the algorithm and the buyer.

Site Operations & Technical Enablement

• Oversee site operations in partnership with the Site Ops Manager and Operations team, ensuring inventory availability, accuracy, and alignment between demand creation (media) and demand planning (inventory) — weekly inventory-media alignment meetings should be standard operating rhythm.
• Serve as key business stakeholder for platform enhancements, integrations, and testing — including site speed optimization, checkout flow improvements, personalization features, and backend workflow automation on Shopify headless.
• Lead the development team and prioritize the engineering pipeline like a product roadmap: sequenced by forecasted impact on revenue, conversion, or margin — not by internal request volume. Partner with the team on QA, releases, and troubleshooting to maintain best-in-class site performance.
• Manage implementation of technical improvements, site tools, and integrations (CMS, DAM, PIM, merchandising tools) to improve operational efficiency and customer experience.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Team Leadership

• Partner with the Director of CRM and Retention teams to align site experience with campaign calendars, lifecycle marketing strategies, and the contribution margin hierarchy (contribution margin → customer metrics → channel metrics) as a shared language for cross-functional decision-making.
• Collaborate with Creative, Product Development, and Brand teams to ensure new product launches and core franchises are merchandised strategically and supported online — translating brand storytelling into site experiences that convert without diluting brand equity.
• Act as a connective thread across Ecommerce, Marketing, and Operations teams — fostering transparency, communication, and joint problem-solving across 12+ stakeholder relationships.
• Manage and mentor two direct reports (Site Operations Manager, Site Merchandising Manager), providing coaching, professional development, and clarity of expectations to drive high performance and engagement. Foster a culture of accountability, data-driven decision-making, and continuous improvement.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™

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QUALIFICATIONS

Education & Certification

• Bachelor’s degree required.

Functional Competencies — Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 8-10 years of progressive ecommerce experience within beauty, fashion, or lifestyle brands; prestige beauty DTC experience strongly preferred. This is the non-negotiable. Candidates without direct DTC beauty experience will struggle with the product education requirements, the GWP/exclusivity mechanics, and the prestige customer psychology that define this role.
• Deep expertise in DTC site management, digital merchandising, and UX optimization on Shopify — headless Shopify experience preferred. Must understand the tradeoffs of headless architecture (speed and flexibility vs. crawlability complexity and dev dependency).
• Demonstrated ability to own and move ecommerce sales KPIs — conversion rate, AOV, UPT, revenue per visitor — through a combination of site merchandising, CRO programs, promotional strategy, and operational discipline. Show us the numbers, not just the titles.
• Strong SEO practitioner knowledge — technical SEO, on-page optimization, content strategy, and structured data implementation. Bonus: familiarity with AEO (answer engine optimization) as AI-powered search reshapes beauty product discovery.
• Fluency in ecommerce analytics and testing tools — GA4, heatmapping tools (Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity), A/B testing platforms, and the ability to build hypothesis-driven CRO programs that combine quantitative funnel data with qualitative user research.
• Working knowledge of the broader ecommerce tech stack — CMS, DAM, PIM, merchandising tools, and project management platforms (Asana, Monday, Wrike). Must be comfortable managing multiple concurrent projects across cross-functional teams.
• Understanding of ecommerce unit economics — contribution margin, CAC, LTV, CAC payback period, and how site-level decisions (promotional cadence, discount strategy, shipping thresholds) flow through to margin. This is a commercially accountable role, not just a UX role.
• Nice-to-haves: Experience with Canadian ecommerce operations (.ca site management, cross-border considerations), and/or experience with B-Corp or sustainability-focused brands where on-site storytelling must authentically communicate mission without undermining commercial performance.

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Leadership & Behavioral Competencies

• Proven ability to manage and develop direct reports while simultaneously influencing cross-functional peers without direct authority — this role partners with 12+ stakeholder groups including CRM, CX, Paid Media, Creative, Brand, Product Development, Planning, Ops, and Sales.
• Strong presentation and communication skills with the ability to present data-driven recommendations to senior leadership and advocate for site-level investments with clear commercial justification.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, founder-mentality environment where ownership, accountability, and speed of execution matter more than hierarchy or process for its own sake.

Personal Characteristics

• High integrity — this role has access to revenue data, promotional strategy, and competitive intelligence that requires discretion and trustworthiness.
• Self-directed and proactive — you see problems before they’re reported and fix systems, not just symptoms.
• Analytically rigorous but commercially intuitive — you can read a funnel report AND read a room.
• Strong communicator who translates technical complexity into business language for cross-functional partners.
• Genuine passion for beauty and the customer experience — you understand that prestige beauty buyers are investing in how they feel about themselves, not just buying shampoo.
• Resilient under pressure — beauty retail has seasonal intensity (holiday, Mother’s Day, back-to-school) that requires composure and planning discipline.
• Intellectually curious — you stay current on ecommerce trends, platform changes, CRO best practices, and competitive moves without being told to.
• Builder mentality — you want to improve systems and leave things better than you found them, not just maintain what exists.

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🟥 BONUS FOR MY READERS: HERE ARE TEN A.I. OPPORTUNITIES FOR THIS ROLE:

1. Your stylists know things your website doesn’t. Which product works for which hair type, which combinations solve which problems, what to recommend and why — that knowledge lives in salon chairs, not Shopify fields. Encoding it into structured data is the single highest-leverage AI project at amika. Everything else depends on it.
2. Review mining is free market research. AI can extract themes from thousands of product reviews in hours — surfacing the exact language your buyers use, the complaints they repeat, and the product comparisons they make. That output feeds PDP copy, SEO content, email segments, and CRO hypotheses simultaneously.
3. Your CRO program should run on AI-generated hypotheses. GA4 funnel analysis, device-level conversion gaps, landing page performance comparisons — this is high-volume, pattern-matching work. AI doesn’t replace the strategist. It gives the strategist 50 hypotheses instead of 5.
4. SEO content is a scale problem, not a quality problem. Ingredient education pages, “best for” guides, and category copy can be AI-generated at 10x speed — if you define what “correct” looks like first. The bottleneck is the spec, not the writing.
5. Answer Engine Optimization is not a bonus skill — it’s the job in 18 months. AI search surfaces are already answering beauty product queries without sending clicks. The brands with structured, machine-readable product data get recommended. The brands with pretty marketing copy don’t. AEO readiness starts with the tribal knowledge encoding above.
6. The mobile conversion gap is an information architecture problem. Prestige product education doesn’t fit on a 6-inch screen the way it’s currently structured. AI can restructure it into progressive disclosure formats — but only after the underlying product knowledge has been pulled out of people’s heads and into structured fields.
7. Inventory-media alignment can be automated. An AI agent that flags mismatches between ad spend and stock levels before the weekly meeting turns a one-hour discussion into a 15-minute decision session.
8. Product portfolio classification is math, not judgment. Sorting SKUs into champions, growth drivers, hidden gems, and underperformers using revenue, velocity, margin, and review data is exactly what AI does faster than humans. What you do with the classification — that’s the human job.
9. Cross-functional communication is a tax you can compress. With 12+ stakeholder groups, this role generates a lot of status updates, meeting prep, and alignment docs. AI drafts them. You edit. Time savings: ~70% on recurring coordination work.
10. The real AI moat here isn’t tools — it’s data. Every AI application at amika (personalization, search, recommendations, agents) runs on the same fuel: structured product knowledge. The Director who builds that data layer builds the competitive advantage. The one who just buys tools doesn’t.

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🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.

RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem.