Head of Design, Buyers

Depop is the community-powered fashion marketplace to buy and sell unique fashion, with over 30 million registered users in more than 150 countries. Depop is a place for anyone to discover and celebrate their style on their own terms, and to feel good about their fashion choices by extending the lives of millions of garments.

The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in London with offices in Manchester and New York. Depop has approximately 400 employees dedicated to its mission of building the world’s most diverse progressive home of fashion, that’s kinder on the planet and kinder to people. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company.

Depop is an equal opportunity employer. Our mission is to build the world’s most diverse progressive home of fashion. To do this, we encourage people from underrepresented communities to apply. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We’re continuing to build recruitment processes that are fair and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments required throughout your interview experience with us. Depop supports visa sponsorship, sponsorship opportunities may be limited to certain roles and skillsets.

As Head of Design, Buyer, you’ll lead Depop’s product design team in the buyer space and lead. You will take on the challenge of creating a user experience that’s both fun and engaging and also makes it easy for buyers to find the fashion that they like. You’ll be charged with creating our product design strategy for the buyer pillar, working closely with both our brand team and our product and engineering teams. 

You will also help set the vision and strategy to elevate the Depop design system and connect it with our vibrant brand. You'll use your influence and expertise to create the conditions for an appealing and compelling design that makes customers fall in love with Depop, and you'll ensure the team has the vision, focus, metrics, processes, and space to execute high-impact work that breathes life into our incredible brand at every customer touchpoint.

Depop is based in London, and we are open to remote candidates in the UK

Responsibilities:

• Managing and supporting designers in the buyer space, crafting paths for career growth and supporting team members in their progression, learning, and development.
• Be the voice for our end user - you will help build empathy at Depop and evangelise what is important to our users
• Lead the evolution and improvement of our design system and design standards and work with engineering to ensure this is well integrated into our code base
• Working closely with our brand team to bring product design and brand design closer together, translating our brand into our product.
• Ensuring that the Depop iOS and Android apps and Depop.com provide a great user experience, maintaining consistency across platforms and with platform standards where it makes sense.
• Co-creating UX strategy for Buyer driving buy-in amongst the Depop community.
• Work with product and engineering to foster a discovery-led approach to product development - not only ensure good product design but design how we should work to achieve this
• Build a culture where every Designer values discovery and continuous learning. You will be personally focused on measuring outcomes and understanding the performance of product changes.
• Ensure excellence in design discipline so that we are building a world-class design team 
• Build good working relationships with colleagues  and stakeholders
• Provide strong team leadership with solid management and communications skills, particularly when explaining creative solutions and bringing the team along on the journey.

Experience:

• An experienced design leader, with experience in managing a team of 4+ people 
• Comfortable and experience working in a product environment where the focus is on continuous learning and delivery, utilising lean discovery processes and experimentation to enable autonomous teams to achieve measurable outcomes
• Strong communication and storytelling skills - using these to build buy-in and alignment across varied stakeholders and motivate and inspire teams
• Demonstrable experience in shaping and implementing a Design system
• Highly effective at cross-functional stakeholder management
• Adept at implementing product design frameworks and cross-functional team workflows 
• Able to turn our product vision into a meaningful direction for your end users.
• Able to bring strategic and big picture thinking, setting a clear vision and plan, whilst also being hands-on and close to the detail. Will bring the right balance of strategy versus implementation needed in a high-growth environment 
• Experience working in a two-sided marketplace and/or in fashion are not required, but are a plus

Additional Information

UK Benefits
Health + Mental Wellbeing

• Cash-plan or PMI - you have the choice of a healthcare plan that best suits you
• Subsidised counselling and coaching - we partner with Selfspace to provide you with the opportunity for a good conversation with a qualified person
• Cycle to Work scheme - choose between Evans or the Green Commute Initiative to help access a bike for your commute
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) - have access to a confidential support network of expert advice 24/7
• Mental Health First Aiders - we have trained individuals across the business to offer support and signposting

Work/Life Balance

• 25 days annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• 1 company-wide day off per quarter, for you to take some time for yourself and decompress
• 2 activism days per year for you to use for volunteering, demonstrations or internal initiatives
• We offer sabbaticals for our long-serving employees.

Flexible Working

We’re Flexa® accredited, meaning we offer genuinely flexible working.
MyMode is our hybrid-working model, designed to empower our employees to choose a working mode that works for them. MyMode is composed of 3 working modes: Flex, Office Based and Remote.

• Flex: we'd love you to head to your nearest Depop office once a week, but feel free to work from home the rest of the week.
• Office: Want to head into the office more? No problem, you can opt to be "Office-Based", with your very own desk.
• Remote: depending on your role you can request to be a remote worker, and only head into the office 4 times per year.

All of our offices are also dog-friendly! Do your best work with your best friend.
You can also apply to work abroad for 4 weeks of the year (in UK tax treaty countries).

Family Life

Our parental leave policies aim to support and enable parents to play equal roles in nurturing their families, in a way that is flexible and truly gender-neutral. Our full-time regular employees are eligible for 18 weeks of paid parental leave for the birth or adoption of their child. We also offer IVF leave, shared parental leave and paid emergency parent/carer leave.

Learn and Grow

• We offer budgets for conferences, learning subscriptions and more. We also sponsor and run a myriad of programmes, conferences and meet-ups to upskill our employees and enhance their journey with us.

Your Future

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension (Depop will match your contribution up to 6% of your qualifying earnings)

And finally, as a valued Depop employee we waive all of our employees’ fees when they sell on Depop so you can ship your sold items anywhere in the UK for free.