Studio Manager

Overall Purpose

The Studio Manager leads the day-to-day running of Bicycle Studio’s Creative Studio, ensuring that every project is delivered on time, within budget and to consistently high standards of creativity, craft and service, with minimum wastage and maximum focus.

You’ll act as the central link between Creative, Design, Production, Client Services, Finance and external partners, translating briefs into clear, practical production plans and maintaining visibility across all work in progress.

Take an end-to-end, channel-neutral approach to creative production, coordinating creative ambition with production requirements, resources, timings, budgets, risks and interdependencies across multiple disciplines and channels.

Create the conditions in which designers, creatives, producers and freelancers can do their best work by setting clear priorities, improving workflows, solving problems quickly and protecting the time and quality needed to deliver outstanding work.

Role-model collaborative, commercially responsible and solutions-focused behaviour, while developing the Studio team and continually improving how the agency makes and delivers creative work.

Key Responsibilities:

• Stakeholder Management & Leadership: Act as the main point of contact for studio operations. Build strong relationships with internal teams, senior leadership, external clients, and trusted suppliers (printers, developers, freelancers, etc.).

• Technical & Operational Excellence: Interrogate briefs, set up project workflows, manage team capacity, and oversee end-to-end production for integrated multi-channel campaigns. Ensure top-tier quality control (proofing, pre-press, asset management) and champion smart production tools (including AI and automation).

• Financial & Commercial Control: Own studio budgets, project estimations, cost tracking, and supplier rate negotiations. Optimise resource allocation to drive agency profitability and ensure all work is fully scoped before execution.

• Team Leadership & Development: Lead, mentor, and motivate our studio team (designers, artworkers, producers). Manage daily priorities, cultivate a collaborative culture, balance freelance usage with internal upskilling, and drive talent onboarding.

• Agency & Business Development: Continuously refine studio systems for maximum efficiency. Bring production expertise to new business pitches and client presentations to ensure creative concepts are both ambitious and achievable.

• Effective Communication: Act as a clear, concise communicator who can simplify complex technical requirements, lead project checkpoints, negotiate effectively under pressure, and present practical solutions to challenges.

Essential Skills & Experience:

• At least five years’ experience in a creative agency, design studio, production environment or comparable creative services role, including meaningful responsibility for project and resource management.

• Strong end-to-end project management capability, with experience managing multiple simultaneous projects, skills, deadlines, budgets and stakeholders.

• A thorough understanding of the creative process and the roles within an integrated creative studio, design team and production environment.

• Demonstrable experience managing studio workflow, resource allocation, capacity planning and cross-functional teams.

• Strong knowledge of design, artwork, print and digital production processes, including proofing, pre-press and quality-control requirements.

• A fast-thinking, practical problem-solver who remains calm, decisive and adaptable when requirements change unexpectedly.

• Experience leading, motivating, coaching or developing creative and production colleagues, including freelancers or external partners.

• Working proficiency in Adobe Creative Cloud applications, particularly InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat, together with Microsoft Office or equivalent productivity tools.

• A collaborative, approachable and solutions-focused leadership style, with a clear commitment to quality, inclusion and continuous improvement.

Remuneration & Benefits:

£50,000 to £60,000, depending on experience

Flexible, extensive benefits post-probation can be found here.

Diversity:

Our success relies on the diverse perspectives of our workforce, and as such, we encourage candidates from all underrepresented communities to apply to work at Bicycle London, either speculatively or for open vacancies they are suitable for.

We strive for everyone to feel like they belong by removing any potential discrimination in the way that candidates and our employees are treated, including:

• people with disabilities (visible and non-visible).

• people of different sexual orientations.

• transgendered and transsexual people.

• people of different races.

• people on the grounds of their sex.

• those of faith and of no faith.

• in relation to their age.

• in relation to their social class or medical condition.

• women who are pregnant, or have recently given birth.

Reasonable Adjustments

Please inform the People team if you require support prior to or during your interview and we will endeavour to support you to ensure you have every possible chance of success.

What to Expect from here

Feedback on whether we’d like to chat to you in an initial interview with the hiring manager

• 1st stage: 30 minutes Google meets CV run-through with Pav (Chief People, Pets & Purpose Officer)

• 2nd stage: in-person interview including a response to brief and meet the team