Next Home Print & Pattern Designer - Hard Goods

Working Pattern: Typically 3 days in the office, with core hours flexible between 8am-6pm.

The Role
As a Print & Pattern Designer for Hard Goods, you will play a key role in defining the surface design, texture, and visual identity of the Next Home range across hard categories, including Home Fragrance packaging, Lighting, Kitchen & Accessories. You will be responsible for creating market leading, commercially successful surface patterns and prints that elevate everyday homeware.

Working as an integral part of our dynamic Home Design team, you’ll translate emerging interior and lifestyle trends into beautiful, functional surface designs that resonate with the Next customer. You will work closely with our Design, Buying, Merchandising, and Product Tech teams, receiving dedicated support and development from our Lead Designers to help you settle in and thrive in your role.

What You’ll Take On

• End to End Surface Design: Create original, commercially viable print, pattern, and graphic concepts for hard goods and packaging, taking products from initial trend research and sketch concepts through to artwork sign off and final sample approval.

• Trend & Material Innovation: Research and interpret global interior, colour, and finish trends, driving innovation across print techniques, surface textures, colour palettes, and material applications.

• Technical Spec & Production Preparation: Produce precise artwork files, scaled CADs, colour separation files, and clear technical spec packs (including pantone references, print execution details, and repeat layouts) to ensure designs are production ready for global manufacturers.

• Cross Functional Collaboration: Work hand in hand with Buying, Merchandising, and Technology teams, as well as external factories and suppliers, to ensure designs meet target price points, pass durability and food safe quality testing, and hit critical path milestones.

• Range Building: Help build cohesive, balanced surface stories and print collections for Hard Goods and Packaging, that seamlessly complement our broader Next Home furniture, textile, and accessory ranges.

What You’ll Bring

• Hard Goods Surface Expertise: Demonstrable experience in surface print and pattern design for home hard goods, with a strong understanding of industrial print processes (such as ceramic transfers, decal placement, glass printing, and surface relief).

• Hard Product & Generating Pattern Expertise: Demonstrable experience of generating pattern on 3D product and packaging. Packaging is a very important part of Home Fragrance for this role.

• Technical Proficiency: Advanced skills in Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator and Photoshop) for creating seamless repeats, clean vector graphics, colour separations, and high quality CAD presentations.

• Commercial Vision: A sharp eye for trend, colour, texture, and composition, paired with a grounded understanding of the Next Home customer and what makes high volume homeware commercially successful.

• Agility & Organisation: Excellent time management and organisational skills, with the ability to manage multiple print stories across different product categories at various stages of the critical path in a fast paced retail environment.

• Collaborative Mindset: A strong team player who builds great working relationships with internal product teams, offshore supplier partners, and external print mills/factories alike.

Portfolios
To help us get a feel for your style, please attach a digital portfolio to your application. We are looking for work that demonstrates a sharp eye for the future of print & pattern, how your ideas can be commercially viable for NEXT, and showcases your direct design and CAD work. To help you put your best foot forward, we’ve put together a fewtop tips on what makes a portfolio stand out to our team.

Applications without a portfolio will not be considered.

Sponsorship

Candidates wishing to apply who would require sponsorship for this role will be required to meet the Home Office sponsorship requirements. For further information please see: https://www.gov.uk/skilled-worker-visa.

We encourage early applications for our roles, as our recruitment process begins as soon as the role is advertised. If we successfully fill the position, this advert may close earlier than planned.At NEXT, we believe the best work happens when there are no barriers to collaboration. That’s why we are a Google-powered workspace. From your very first day, you’ll be using the full Google Workspace suite; Docs, Drive, and Meet, to stay connected and move fast. If your previous experience is rooted in other software suites, don’t worry! We’ll point you to a digital Google toolkit the moment you join, packed with handy guides and insider tips to help you transition smoothly and hit the ground running.