Senior Conceptual Creative

Location: London, UK

SharpEnd is an experience-led connected studio, partnering with ambitious brands to reimagine the real world as a connected platform. We design and deliver connected physical–digital experiences for global brands: from NFC-connected products and physical connected spaces to mobile, web, and experiential activations.

We are hiring a Senior Conceptual Creative to join the Studio team. This role is explicitly idea-led and experience-first.

You will be the creative engine behind how SharpEnd responds to briefs: shaping concepts, driving ambition, and ensuring our experiential work is bold, culturally grounded, and narratively coherent across every touchpoint.

The Role:

• You are accountable for the quality and ambition of creative thinking in the Studio.
• You partner closely with creative technology, design and production to:
• Lead the conceptual response to briefs across physical, digital, and connected experience
• Raise the creative ceiling across pitches, proposals, and live work
• Champion experience-first storytelling that connects brand intent to human behaviour
• You will work across multiple concurrent projects, pitches, and formats. You are as comfortable in a blank-page concepting session as you are refining narrative under deadline pressure.

Core Accountabilities:

• Own conceptual creative direction across briefs from first response through to execution handover.
• Be the voice of creative ambition and experiential quality in the Studio.
• Shape pitch narratives and presentation structures that communicate ideas with clarity and impact.
• Collaborate to stress-test concepts for feasibility and originality.

Success in this role is measured by:

• Work that is genuinely surprising, not just strategically sound
• Concepts that hold up under scrutiny: creative, technical, and commercial
• A Studio that produces more iconic work, more consistently

Responsibilities:

• Conceptual Leadership
• Lead ideation and creative development across connected experience briefs.
• Generate original concepts that span physical environments, digital interactions, and brand narrative.
• Ensure ideas are rooted in insight: cultural, behavioural, and experiential.
• Push beyond the obvious and know how to defend why.

Experience Storytelling:

• Translate concepts into compelling narratives across decks, presentations, and stakeholder moments.
• Shape the experiential arc of projects: how people move through, feel, and remember them.
• Write, art-direct, and frame with equal confidence.

Creative Collaboration:

• Work closely with Creative Technologists to understand what's technically possible and where to push further.
• Implement strategy or insights to ensure concepts are culturally coherent and commercially grounded.
• Brief, guide, and elevate the work of other creatives or partners across visual, copy, and interaction disciplines.

Studio Creative Standards

• Contribute to raising the bar on how the Studio conceives and communicates ideas.
• Help build a culture of creative ambition: opinionated, rigorous, and genuinely curious.
• Support creative critique in a way that sharpens output without stifling risk-taking.

About You:

• Creative Range
• A portfolio of experiential, connected, or physical–digital work that demonstrates conceptual ambition, not just executional finish.
• Comfortable thinking across brand, environment, interaction, and narrative simultaneously.
• Strong sense of cultural context: what makes an idea land, what makes it dated.

Storytelling & Communication:

• Exceptional at structuring and presenting ideas, verbally, visually and on the page.
• Able to take a complex brief and return with something unexpected and precise.
• Confident pitching to senior clients and internal stakeholders.

Collaboration & Craft:

• Works well in hybrid creative teams alongside technologists, designers and producers.
• Has a strong point of view but holds it lightly: open to challenge, responsive to feedback.
• Brings craft to the process: concept development, narrative shaping, and editorial judgement.

Ways of Working:

• Experience working in an agency, studio, or consultancy environment, ideally across brand, experiential, or emerging technology briefs.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, fast timelines, and briefs that evolve mid-process.
• Self-directed and able to manage creative workload across multiple projects simultaneously.

This Role Is Not For:

• Creatives who work best within a single conventional discipline (copy, art direction) without broader conceptual range.
• People who need a defined brief before thinking starts.
• Those more comfortable executing others' ideas than generating their own.

How This Role Adds Value Over Time:

• Beyond individual briefs, this role helps the Studio develop a more distinct and ambitious creative identity — building the conceptual foundations that make SharpEnd's work consistently harder to replicate and easier to sell.

What We Offer:

• Pension: 3% employer contribution (People's Pension, from 3 months).
• Holiday: 20 days + festive shutdown, plus 1 additional day per year of service (up to 5).
• Health Insurance: Vitality (post-probation).
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP).
• Cycle to Work Scheme and dog-friendly office.
• Work From Anywhere: Up to 2 weeks per year (UK time).
• Office Perks: Breakfast, drinks, and snacks.