Customer Intelligence & AI Manager

Company
“A perfume is a world you can return to over and over again–a keyhole into far off places–material and imaginary.”
D.S. & Durga is a Brooklyn fragrance house on a quest to create thrilling perfumes inspired by music, myth, and the mundane. Founded in 2009 by David (D.S.) and Kavi (Durga) Moltz, the brand is known for its uniquely distinguished perfumes, candles, and aromatic products. All fragrances and design worlds are original compositions, rooted in specificity, surrealism, and clarity.
With distribution across 600 doors globally and five freestanding stores in NYC and LA, the brand is entering a new phase of growth following Manzanita Capital’s majority investment in 2024.

Role Overview
D.S. & Durga has built a loyal following through creative vision, and its next chapter depends on sustainable growth grounded in a clear, unified understanding of the customer — something the business has never had. Right now, customer data exists everywhere and is owned nowhere: DTC, retail, social, and commercial teams each see a different slice of the picture, and major decisions about products, launches, investments, and channels get made without a shared view of who the customer actually is. The Manager, Customer Intelligence & AI exists to close that gap, building a trusted, fact-based customer intelligence function rather than a reporting role. It reports to the CMO to protect its objectivity, while partnering closely with the Senior Manager, Global Marketing & Innovation to prioritize where that intelligence gets applied and embed it into campaign, innovation, and pricing decisions.
This person will build and own D.S. & Durga’s customer intelligence capability from the ground up, working across marketing, commercial, retail, and the creative studio to connect, interpret, and make useful the data that already exists — not to collect it, but to unify it into a single actionable picture, in partnership with the teams (social, web, DTC, retail) who own the underlying sources. The role unfolds in two phases: first building the internal customer view, SKU-level data infrastructure, and core reporting; then expanding into brand and market intelligence, including competitive benchmarking, share of voice, and cultural trend monitoring. As a single-person function from the outset, the role requires genuine LLM fluency — training, fine-tuning, and directing models and agents to do the work of a team that doesn’t exist yet, making automation and AI-assisted analysis the foundation of the function’s credibility.

Key Responsibilities
Phase One — Customer & Business View

• Build one unified, omni-channel customer view based on real purchasing behavior, basket data, lifetime value, frequency, channel preference, and product affinity
• Deliver SKU-level intelligence — what’s selling, what isn’t, where, at what price point, in which channel, and why
• Own monthly dashboard and reporting, giving leadership, commercial, retail, and marketing a consistent view of business performance, customer behavior, and emerging trends
• Integrate social, web, DTC, and retail data sources into a single intelligence framework
• Develop customer segmentation that reflects both target audience strategy and data reality, informing innovation priorities, marketing investment, and commercial planning
• Train and direct AI models and agents to automate reporting, accelerate analysis, and surface insight faster — giving the function the leverage of a small team while it remains one person

Phase Two — Brand & Market Intelligence

• Track brand health — awareness, consideration, sentiment, and share of voice across key markets
• Lead competitive benchmarking and category trend monitoring
• Monitor AI visibility — how D.S. & Durga appears in AI-generated search and recommendations
• Partner with Global Marketing on consumer research initiatives — surveys, panels, qualitative studies
• Track cultural trend signals relevant to the brand’s world — music, travel, fragrance, design, literature

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Serve as a connective force across marketing, commercial, retail, and the creative studio without owning every underlying data source
• Partner day-to-day with the Senior Manager, Global Marketing & Innovation to prioritize where intelligence is applied and embed it into campaign, innovation, and pricing decisions
• Maintain independence and objectivity so insights are trusted as unfiltered,…