Director of Marketing
Brighton, CO
Full Time
Executive
Company Overview
Watermill Express (“Watermill”) is a leading provider of refill kiosks offering affordable, sustainable, and safe drinking water and ice through a convenient drive-up format. The Company operates nearly 1,300 kiosks across eight states, primarily throughout the West Coast and Sunbelt regions, with significant expansion potential ahead.
Watermill maintains rigorous standards across all aspects of its operations—from water quality and food safety to the appearance, cleanliness, and functionality of its kiosks. Each unit is serviced and sanitized daily to ensure a consistently positive experience for customers and landlords.
A core pillar of Watermill’s mission is encouraging customers to refill reusable bottles, helping families save money while reducing environmental impact. To date, the company has prevented billions of single-use plastic water bottles from entering U.S. landfills, reinforcing its long-standing commitment to sustainability and responsible growth.
Watermill operates a high-frequency, low-average-ticket retail model. Marketing success requires disciplined customer acquisition, strong local execution, and a focus on driving repeat behavior and household penetration within each kiosk’s trade area.
Position Summary
Watermill is seeking an experienced entrepreneurial Director of Marketing to build and lead the company’s marketing function. This newly created role will define how Watermill communicates its brand value proposition, drives hyper-local awareness, converts first-time users to habitual refill customers, and supports disciplined expansion into new markets.
Reporting directly to the COO, the Director of Marketing will develop and execute a comprehensive, ROI-driven marketing strategy spanning brand positioning, local store marketing (LSM), social media, customer acquisition, loyalty, community engagement, and go-to-market initiatives.
This is a hands-on leadership role ideal for a strategic “player-coach” who thrives in building from the ground up within a fast-growing, multi-unit retail business. The ideal candidate understands how to market a proximity-based, value-oriented consumer service with strong cost-of-acquisition discipline and measurable return expectations.
Why This Role is Exciting
The Director of Marketing is responsible for:
Player-coach role with direct supervision of two marketing team members. Oversee agency partners, field activation vendors or contract resources as needed. Build team capability in analytics, local execution, and performance marketing as the company expands. The marketing team is expected to grow as company expansion targets are achieved, and the ideal candidate will demonstrate strong leadership and talent-development capabilities.
Education and/or Experience
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
While performing the duties of this Job, the employee is regularly required to sit and talk or hear. The employee is frequently required to use hands to finger, handle, or feel and reach with hands and arms. The employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; climb or balance and stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl. The employee may occasionally move up to 35 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision and ability to adjust focus.
Travel and Work Environment
Up to 25% travel may be required, including in-market visits to kiosks and community locations. Work will be split between general office settings and field environments engaging directly with customers and partners.
The office environment is typically an open or cubicle-based workspace or private office with moderate noise levels.
Compensation and Benefits
Watermill Express (“Watermill”) is a leading provider of refill kiosks offering affordable, sustainable, and safe drinking water and ice through a convenient drive-up format. The Company operates nearly 1,300 kiosks across eight states, primarily throughout the West Coast and Sunbelt regions, with significant expansion potential ahead.
Watermill maintains rigorous standards across all aspects of its operations—from water quality and food safety to the appearance, cleanliness, and functionality of its kiosks. Each unit is serviced and sanitized daily to ensure a consistently positive experience for customers and landlords.
A core pillar of Watermill’s mission is encouraging customers to refill reusable bottles, helping families save money while reducing environmental impact. To date, the company has prevented billions of single-use plastic water bottles from entering U.S. landfills, reinforcing its long-standing commitment to sustainability and responsible growth.
Watermill operates a high-frequency, low-average-ticket retail model. Marketing success requires disciplined customer acquisition, strong local execution, and a focus on driving repeat behavior and household penetration within each kiosk’s trade area.
Position Summary
Watermill is seeking an experienced entrepreneurial Director of Marketing to build and lead the company’s marketing function. This newly created role will define how Watermill communicates its brand value proposition, drives hyper-local awareness, converts first-time users to habitual refill customers, and supports disciplined expansion into new markets.
Reporting directly to the COO, the Director of Marketing will develop and execute a comprehensive, ROI-driven marketing strategy spanning brand positioning, local store marketing (LSM), social media, customer acquisition, loyalty, community engagement, and go-to-market initiatives.
This is a hands-on leadership role ideal for a strategic “player-coach” who thrives in building from the ground up within a fast-growing, multi-unit retail business. The ideal candidate understands how to market a proximity-based, value-oriented consumer service with strong cost-of-acquisition discipline and measurable return expectations.
Why This Role is Exciting
- Build from the ground up: This is Watermill’s first senior-level marketing leadership role, offering the opportunity to establish strategy, processes, and performance standards that will scale nationally.
- High-impact, measurable role: Marketing must directly drive traffic, frequency, and household penetration at the kiosk level. Success will be impactful and quantifiable.
- Executive visibility and influence: You’ll report directly to the COO and partner closely with the CEO and senior leadership team to shape the company’s go-to-market approach.
- Purpose-driven brand: Watermill provides an essential, affordable product while making a meaningful environmental and community impact at scale.
- Proven growth platform: Join a company with a 40-year+ track record of success and continued expansion across markets, demographics, and customer use cases.
The Director of Marketing is responsible for:
- Driving low-cost customer acquisition within a 1–3-mile trade radius of each kiosk.
- Increasing visit frequency and repeat usage through habit-forming programs.
- Establishing a scalable Local Store Marketing (LSM) playbook for new and existing markets.
- Building marketing measurement discipline tied to kiosk-level performance.
- Build and own the marketing function:
- Establish Watermill’s marketing strategy, operating cadence, performance dashboards, and annual marketing planning process.
- Define clear KPIs including cost per acquired household, repeat rate, frequency, trade-area penetration, and payback period.
- Identify tools, technology, and agency partners required to scale efficiently.
- Manage and develop a small but growing marketing team (currently two direct reports).
- Hyper-local customer acquisition strategy:
- Develop geo-targeted digital programs focused on 1–3-mile trade areas.
- Create disciplined paid media programs with strict CAC targets.
- Design grassroots, community-based acquisition strategies including partnerships with businesses, schools, apartments, community organizations, and local events.
- Optimize marketing mix based on performance data at the kiosk and regional level.
- Local store marketing (LSM) & community activation:
- Build a repeatable LSM toolkit for kiosk launches and underperforming locations.
- Lead new market entry marketing plans, including pre-opening awareness, launch activation, and post-opening retention efforts.
- Develop field marketing playbooks that can be executed consistently across regions.
- Loyalty, frequency & habit formation
- Develop and implement customer retention and loyalty initiatives designed to increase repeat usage and lifetime value.
- Explore SMS, mobile, or simple rewards-based systems to reinforce refill behavior.
- Partner with Operations and Finance to evaluate ROI and customer lifetime value.
- Brand strategy and positioning:
- Refine and clarify Watermill's value proposition centered on affordability, safety, convenience, and sustainability.
- Ensure consistent messaging across physical kiosks, digital channels, community materials, and landlord communications.
- Elevate Watermill's position as a trusted community resource for safe drinking water and ice.
- Campaign development & demand generation:
- Develop clear, compelling campaigns tied to seasonal usage (summer, holidays, events, etc.).
- Promote bundled offerings (e.g., water + ice) to increase average transaction value.
- Drive targeted awareness in expansion markets.
- Data, analytics & performance discipline:
- Partner closely with Finance to model CAC, LTV, and marketing payback.
- Track marketing performance at the kiosk and market level.
- Reallocate resources based on measurable ROI.
- Cross-functional collaboration:
- Work closely with Operations, Development, Finance, and Product to ensure marketing initiatives are operationally executable and economically sound.
- Support landlord relationships and new site development with marketing materials and performance data.
Player-coach role with direct supervision of two marketing team members. Oversee agency partners, field activation vendors or contract resources as needed. Build team capability in analytics, local execution, and performance marketing as the company expands. The marketing team is expected to grow as company expansion targets are achieved, and the ideal candidate will demonstrate strong leadership and talent-development capabilities.
Education and/or Experience
- Bachelor’s degree required
- 7+ years of progressive marketing experience
- Experience in multi-unit retail, restaurant, convenience, grocery, or consumer services businesses strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated experience managing marketing in a low-average-ticket, high-frequency retail environment is highly desirable.
- Experience building or significantly evolving a marketing function from early stage to scaled execution preferred.
- Strong understanding of unit economics, CAC/LTV modeling, and ROI-driven decision making.
- Exceptional storytelling ability paired with strong analytical rigor.
- Demonstrated ability to operate with cost discipline in a low-ticket business model.
- Experience designing hyper-local and community-based marketing programs.
- Strong performance marketing and analytics mindset.
- Ability to operate as both strategist and hands-on executor.
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills.
- Comfortable working in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial growth environment.
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
While performing the duties of this Job, the employee is regularly required to sit and talk or hear. The employee is frequently required to use hands to finger, handle, or feel and reach with hands and arms. The employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; climb or balance and stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl. The employee may occasionally move up to 35 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision and ability to adjust focus.
Travel and Work Environment
Up to 25% travel may be required, including in-market visits to kiosks and community locations. Work will be split between general office settings and field environments engaging directly with customers and partners.
The office environment is typically an open or cubicle-based workspace or private office with moderate noise levels.
Compensation and Benefits
- Competitive base salary range: $125,000 – $135,000, based on qualifications
- Generous performance-based bonus program
- Comprehensive benefits package, including no-cost employee-only medical premiums with employer HSA contributions
- Dental and vision coverage
- 401(k) retirement plan with immediate match and vesting
- Paid time off and paid holidays
If you meet the requirements outlined above and would like to work for a successful company, we encourage you to apply today!
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