Toklas  ·  Toklas Bakery  ·  Meret  ·  Fort Road Hotel

Head of Brand, Marketing & Growth

Where

London

Hours

Full time

Salary

£80–90k plus performance bonus

We are looking for a brilliant marketer who thinks marketing is changing fundamentally.

The opportunity

We are four independent food and hospitality businesses with a combined turnover of around £9.5m.

You should care deeply about brands, food, design and culture — but be equally interested in Shopify conversion, customer data, paid acquisition, automation and AI.

We want someone who is constantly asking: is there a better way to do this?

You will lead marketing across Toklas Restaurant, Toklas Bakery, Meret Chocolate and Fort Road Hotel. The brands are deliberately different. Your job isn't to make them look or sound the same. It is to build a small, exceptionally effective marketing operation behind them.

AI and experimentation

We are particularly interested in how AI can make a small marketing team significantly more capable.

You should already be experimenting with AI and automation in your own work — not because it's fashionable, but because you're curious about how it can improve creative work, customer insight, ecommerce, CRM, paid media, reporting and productivity.

We don't expect you to know every new tool. We do expect you to be the person who discovers useful new tools before we do, tests them, works out whether they genuinely improve the work, and implements the good ones. We would expect you to show us things every few months that we didn't know were possible.

The commercial challenge

This isn't principally a communications job. You will have real commercial objectives.

• Meret: build a significant Shopify business using ecommerce, CRM, organic content, PR, paid social and search, with an initial target of £10,000+ monthly ecommerce revenue.
• Toklas Bakery: increase customer frequency, make demand more predictable and support expansion.
• Fort Road Hotel: increase direct bookings and build demand for the hotel, restaurant and bar.
• Toklas Restaurant: get more value from an already strong reputation, audience, events business and PR presence.

You will be responsible for the marketing budget and expected continually to question whether we're spending it in the most effective way — including what should be done internally, automated, bought externally or simply stopped.

What you'll own

• Marketing strategy, budget and quarterly plans across all four businesses.
• Brand positioning and the distinct identity of each business.
• PR and the conversion of earned attention into traffic, bookings, customers and sales.
• CRM, email, segmentation and customer data.
• Shopify ecommerce, conversion optimisation and customer journeys.
• Paid social, search and performance measurement.
• Social, content and the management of a Content & Social Manager.
• External specialists across PR, digital, SEO, photography, film and design.
• AI experimentation, automation and new marketing technology.
• Clear monthly commercial reporting.

Who we're looking for

We're less interested in where you've worked than in how you think.

You might currently be a Head of Marketing, Senior Marketing Manager, Growth Lead or senior brand/ecommerce marketer ready to take on a broader role. You could come from food, hospitality, ecommerce, retail, a consumer brand, technology or an agency.

• Exceptional brand and visual judgement.
• Strong commercial instincts.
• Real digital and ecommerce understanding.
• Experience with paid social/search, CRM and customer data.
• An experimental approach to AI and automation.
• An understanding of PR and earned media.
• The ability to distinguish useful technology from hype.
• Curiosity about food, hospitality, design and culture.
• The confidence to challenge founders and senior management.
• A desire to keep learning.

We don't want a pure performance marketer. We don't want someone who thinks marketing means Instagram. And we don't want someone who uses AI to produce large quantities of mediocre content.

We want someone capable of combining taste, curiosity, technology and commercial thinking.

How to apply

Send your CV to careers@toklas.co.uk, with short answers to these three questions:

1. What are three ways you've used AI or automation in your marketing work during the past 12 months?
2. Tell us about one new marketing technology or approach you've discovered recently that you think is genuinely important.
3. Tell us about something you stopped spending money or time on because you found a better way to achieve the same result.

Please don't use AI to make your answers sound impressive. We're much more interested in what you've actually tried.

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