About the RoleThe Vice President, Digital Experience & Optimization leads the end-to-end digital storefront, owning how the brand comes to life online and how customers experience, navigate, and shop the site.
This role is accountable for site experience, UX/UI, merchandising, conversion rate optimization and digital operations, ensuring the ecommerce platform delivers a seamless, intuitive, and high-performing customer journey that drives conversion, engagement, and loyalty.
Reporting to the Chief Ecommerce Officer, this leader translates ecommerce strategy into execution-owning how the site performs day-to-day and how it evolves over time to meet customer expectations and business goals. The ideal candidate combines consumer empathy, strong UX/UI judgment, commercial instinct, and analytical rigor-using data to identify opportunities, prioritize effectively, and drive measurable improvements across the customer journey.
You'll Make a Difference ByConsumer Experience & UX/UI- Owning the end-to-end digital customer experience, with a strong emphasis on mobile-first design and performance
- Defining and driving the UX/UI vision and roadmap, ensuring an intuitive, engaging, and frictionless journey from discovery through checkout
- Using behavioral data and customer insights to identifying friction points and prioritizing improvements
- Translating insights into clear hypotheses and test plans, ensuring decisions are validated through measurable impact
- Partnering with Brand and Creative to bringing product storytelling and seasonal narratives to life on-site
Ecommerce Performance & Conversion Rate Optimization- Owning site performance metrics (conversion, AOV, engagement, funnel progression) and contributing directly to overall ecommerce revenue performance
- Leading the company's CRO function, setting the vision for experimentation and optimization, building a data-driven testing culture, and ensuring insights from A/B testing and behavioral analytics consistently translating into measurable lifts in conversion and revenue
- Leading the site trading cadence (daily/weekly), identifying trends, risks, and opportunities and driving timely action
- Translating ecommerce, merchandising, and marketing strategies into high-impact on-site execution
- Partnering with Merchandising and Planning to optimizing product visibility, sell-through, and full-price realization
Site Operations & Merchandising- Owning day-to-day site operations, including content publishing, promotional execution, QA, and incident response
- Establishing and enforcing operational standards and SLAs to ensuring consistent, high-quality execution
- Leading the site merchandising strategy, including navigation, search, category pages, and product detail pages
- Owning the digital product catalog, ensuring accuracy, completeness, and speed to market in a high-SKU environment
- Overseeing content management systems and the team operating them, establishing processes, governance, and tooling enabling frequent, efficient site updates while developing foundational strategy and infrastructure supporting personalization as a growing capability
Personalization & Analytics- Leveraging site analytics and customer behavior data to diagnosing performance and uncovering growth opportunities
- Defining and monitoring core funnel metrics and translating insights into action across UX, merchandising, and personalization
- Leading a practical personalization strategy, including recommendations, search optimization, and segmentation
- Building a test-and-learn culture, ensuring decisions are hypothesis-driven and measured
Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership- Leading, coaching, and developing a high-performing team across UX/UI, Site Ops, Merchandising, and Personalization
- Building a culture of accountability, speed, and continuous improvement
- Partnering closely with Technology, Product, and Marketing to aligning priorities and executing effectively
- Serving as a key member of the ecommerce leadership team, partnering with the Chief Ecommerce Officer on planning and performance tracking
- Assisting with other responsibilities based on business needs.
About You- 12+ years of ecommerce leadership experience, with ownership of site experience, UX/UI, and digital operations
- Experience operating at scale within an ecommerce business, preferably in apparel, footwear, or consumer retail
- Proven ability to improve conversion, engagement, and customer experience through data-driven decision making
- Strong analytical capability; able to translate complex data into clear actions and business impact
- Deep expertise in UX/UI, customer journey optimization, and mobile-first ecommerce design
- Strong commercial acumen and experience managing in-season ecommerce performance
- Experience leading cross-functional initiatives across Marketing, Technology, and Product
- Demonstrated success building and leading multi-disciplinary teams
- Experience in an omni-channel environment (DTC + retail/wholesale) preferred
- Background with premium or lifestyle brands preferred
- Experience leading major site redesigns, replatforming, or personalization initiatives preferred
The salary range for this position is $270,000 - $290,000 per year.
The salary is determined by the education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data for geographic locations. Ariat in good faith believes that this posted compensation range is accurate for this role at this location at the time of this posting. This range may be modified in the future.
Ariat's holistic benefits package for full-time team members includes (but is not limited to):
- Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance options
- Expanded wellness and mental health benefits
- Paid time off (PTO), paid holidays, and paid volunteer days
- 401(k) with company match
- Bonus incentive plans
- Team member discount on Ariat merchandise
Note: Availability of benefits may be subject to location & employment type and may have certain eligibility requirements. Ariat reserves the right to alter these benefits in whole or in part at any time without advance notice.
