Head of Retention and Subscription

Job Advert

Protein Works is a high-growth DTC nutrition brand with a clear mission: help people live healthier, happier lives through the power of nutrition. Protein Works is a brand with a genuinely loyal community, strong product-market fit, and real growth ambition. Retention is not a support function here - it's a commercial lever, and this role has full ownership of it.

You'll be the first person to build this function, with AI at its core from day one. That means real scope, real budget, and real impact on the P&L - not a mandate to run email campaigns and report on open rates. The customer base is large, the data is rich, and the opportunity to compound LTV. If you want a role where retention is taken seriously as a growth driver, this is it.

You'll lead our retention strategy with AI at the centre - using intelligent tooling to personalise lifecycle communications, predict churn, and drive LTV at scale. Subscription growth is a core commercial priority, and this hire will shape how we win, retain, and grow it.

Success means customers buy more often, stay longer, and choose us over every competitor in their feed.

What You'll Own

• Own and grow subscription revenue - acquisition into programme, activation, and long-term retention
• Drive LTV across all our of core products, through tailored lifecycle strategies
• Lead CRM end-to-end: flows, segmentation, campaigns, and triggered comms across email, SMS, and push
• Deploy AI tooling to personalise at scale - predictive churn modelling, next-best-product recommendations, and dynamic content execution
• Build and optimise win-back programmes that recover lapsed customers and reduce net churn
• Own cohort analysis and retention reporting - turn data into decisions, not slide decks
• Partner with Paid Media and Product to ensure the post-click experience converts and retains
• Build the playbook from the ground up - this is a founding-level retention function
• Support, develop and challenge our retention team; set the standard for analytical rigour and creative ambition.

What Success Looks Like

• Subscription revenue growing month-on-month with churn rate trending down
• LTV:CAC ratio improving across key customer cohorts
• CRM flows generating measurable incremental revenue, not just opens and clicks
• AI-driven personalisation deployed across at least two major lifecycle stages within 6 months
• Repeat purchase rate increasing for first-time buyers across top product lines

Skills & Experience

Must-Have

• 5+ years in a retention, CRM, or lifecycle marketing role - ideally in DTC ecommerce or subscription
• Proven track record of improving LTV, reducing churn, and growing a subscription base commercially
• Hands-on experience with AI or predictive tooling applied to customer marketing (not just prompting - actual deployment)
• Strong CRM platform proficiency
• Data-literate: comfortable owning cohort analysis, building retention dashboards, and presenting commercial impact
• Experience working with multiple customer segments, not just a single persona

Nice-to-Have

• Experience marketing in health, nutrition, wellness, or FMCG DTC
• Familiarity with health and wellness consumer trends and how they're reshaping acquisition strategies
• Experience with TikTok Shop or affiliate/influencer performance channels
• Background in building or scaling a paid media team

Behaviours & Traits

• Commercially wired - you think in LTV, contribution margin, and payback periods, not just campaign metrics
• Ownership mindset - you don't wait to be told; you identify the gap and go close it
• Comfortable with ambiguity - the playbook doesn't fully exist yet; you'll write it
• Bias for testing - you run experiments, read the data, and act on it quickly
• Customer-obsessed without being soft - you understand what makes Protein Works' community tick and you use that commercially