String Ting is a London-based accessories brand that turned a £70 lockdown experiment into a globally distributed business. Six years in, we sell phone straps, bag charms and collectible pieces to customers across the UK, US, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Our pieces sit on the wrists of Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Dua Lipa, and on the shelves of independent retailers and concept stores worldwide.
We are female-founded, profitable, bootstrapped and have taken zero outside investment. In 2026 we're targeting doubling revenue in 2026, scaling our wholesale business, opening new international markets and broadening the range. The studio is in Camberwell. We're 15 people. Everything is built in-house — the products, the systems, the brand.
This isn't a typical 15-person DTC brand. It's a serious commercial concern with the discipline of a much larger business and the optionality of a much smaller one. The next 18 months are about scaling without losing what makes the brand work.
About the founders
Rachel Steed-Middleton (Co-Founder & Creative Director) — strategist by training, creative by instinct. Before String Ting, Rachel held senior roles at some of the most respected agencies in the world: Anomaly, Winkreative (Tyler Brûlé's agency), Mullen Lowe Profero and Leo Burnett, latterly as Executive Director at a London branding agency. She founded String Ting in 2020 and has built it from scratch into a globally recognised brand with cult collaborations and a serious commercial engine underneath.
Leigh Steed-Middleton (Co-Founder, Commercial) — operator and product leader. Leigh was most recently President at SEDNA, a B2B SaaS scaleup, and was previously its Chief Product Officer. Before SEDNA he was Managing Director of Signal Noise, part of The Economist Group, and has spent ~15 years building products, businesses and teams across consumer, media and enterprise software. Inside String Ting, Leigh leads commercial, systems and the data infrastructure that powers decisions across the business.
Between us, we've spent our careers learning what excellent looks like in very different industries. The reason this role exists is that we want to bring more of that operating discipline into how the business runs day-to-day.
The role
We're hiring an Operating Lead to be the operational backbone of the studio and Rachel's right hand inside the business.
This role sits between strategy and execution. The honest split of the work:
- ~60% is strategic, cross-functional and founder-facing — running projects, owning the reporting cadence, sharpening how we make decisions, building the systems and workflows that scale us, and contributing to commercial planning.
- ~40% is commercial admin — stock and materials buying, supplier coordination, launch QC, pricing, GTINs, critical-path tracking.
Both halves matter. The strategic half is where leverage compounds. The admin half is where the business actually runs. The people who thrive here see them as the same job — the admin half is the raw material from which the strategic half is built. If you're allergic to operating detail, this isn't your role.
The shape of the role
Rachel's right hand
- Partner with Rachel day-to-day on the highest-priority strategic and creative decisions
- Manage her calendar, meeting prep, travel and focus — anticipate before being asked
- Be the first reader, second brain and friction-remover on whatever she's working on
Commercial operations and studio work
- Own stock visibility across finished goods and raw materials — flag overstock, stockouts and slow movers
- Run materials buying and supplier comms; manage purchase orders and lead times
- Track bead liability against usage; manage working capital tied up in raw materials
- Own launch readiness end-to-end — pricing accuracy, inventory, the market pricing matrix, GTINs, asset readiness
- Track the critical path across sampling, production and materials
Reporting, analysis and systems
- Own the weekly trade rhythm — sales, inventory, performance — and turn the numbers into a narrative
- Build forecasting foundations on core lines and develop range-planning discipline
- Use our internal AI tooling (Bead Bot™) daily to surface insights and build reusable workflows
- Spot the trends, anomalies and KPIs that should be steering us
Cross-functional execution
- Own the commercial drop calendar and project-manage launches end-to-end across studio, ops and e-commerce
- Support wholesale relationships and feasibility on new product development
- Pick up the things no one else is picking up
Who you are
The strongest candidates we've seen for roles like this come from a few patterns:
- Two to four years into a strategy or commercial track — at a top consultancy, in banking, or on a respected grad scheme — looking for the operating job that's actually a business education
- An operator at another early-stage business — Founder's Associate, Biz Ops, Chief of Staff — ready for more scope, a tighter feedback loop, and a real P&L to feel the weight of
- A high-performer from a top consumer-brand or FMCG grad scheme who wants to step out of process and into ownership
What unites the people who do this job well:
- They are builders. They've made something — a process, a tool, a product, a small business — from a blank page in a messy environment.
- They are commercially fluent. They read a P&L without flinching. They ask sharp questions about unit economics, working capital, contribution margin and sell-through.
- They have unusual range. They can run a five-person creative meeting at 10am and reconcile a stock count at 2pm without context-switching cost.
- They are action-biased. They don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. They confuse activity with progress less often than most.
- They are fluent with AI. Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini are daily tools. They prompt well, build workflows, and treat AI as a force multiplier — not a novelty. This is non-negotiable for how we work.
- They are honest and self-aware. They flag mistakes early, ask for help when stuck, and don't hide behind output.
Bonus: experience in DTC, e-commerce, accessories, fashion or premium consumer brands; SQL or BigQuery literacy; familiarity with Shopify, Klaviyo or similar.
What you'll get from this role
This is set up as the operating job that compounds. The reps you'll get in 18–24 months here are the reps that take most operators five years to find elsewhere:
- Sustained, direct exposure to two founders running a profitable, growing, internationally distributed brand
- Pattern reps across the full operating stack — supplier negotiation, range planning, launch ops, working capital, wholesale, international expansion, brand
- A real P&L at meaningful scale, with the room to influence it
- A studio-based working environment in Camberwell with a small, calibre team
- A role that grows with the business as we scale from £1.8M to £10M+. New scope opens up as you earn it.
We hire rarely and never out of urgency. We're looking for someone who'll stay long enough to compound — and we'll back them when they're ready for what's next.
If you've read this far and the role feels like you, we'd love to hear from you. If the admin half made you flinch, this isn't the role for you.