Fresh

Leading up to the holidays last year I was keeping an eye on what West Elm was doing with their email designs. They were aggressively marketing to me and I was impressed with all of the emails I received! The clean design and photography is really first class and they used a number of devices to keep them interesting day-to-day.

West elm has a slew of what look to be templates that are super clean in their design. They rely on the great product photography for the most part and always have a grid as the foundation. There is care taken with the typography and this helps the designs sing. The photography is very high quality with beautiful staging.

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Finding The Perfect Storm

Often email gets overlooked as a space for telling stories. The primary function is, rightfully, prompting action. However, sometimes the right mix of elements can come together to bring both of these things into one piece. This project was one of those opportunities, so we wanted to share it here.

Icebreaker is an apparel company focusing on a very special product that mixes the versatility of an outdoor technical product, the sleek aesthetic of an activewear product, and the sustainability few companies can boast with its refined merino wool fabric. They have a fantastic brand story and push the envelope with their presence, often using provocative and mythical imagery to support their ethos that reminds us that “it’s about our relationship to nature, and to each other.”

In this instance Icebreaker wanted us to help announce their newest line of clothing for the Spring 2010 season (It’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere). We took this opportunity to not only elevate the presence of their brand in email, but also to use some unique ways of getting their message across. We created two versions of this email, one vertical and one horizontal. Some background on why we wanted to try this out can be found on this previous post by Dylan over on Email Wars.

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We’ve been hard at work lately (as demonstrated here by our lack of posting), so its good to know sometimes that all that hard work gets recognized out there in the wide world of webs. Now, this is not the place we would normally indulge in shameless self promotion, but we thought you all might see this worthy.

Just yesterday a link came through to the group here that eROI has a few nods in the category of email newsletters over on the site BEN (Beautiful Email Newsletters). The content here is user-generated, so its rad to see our stuff show up multiple times. There’s really some great work here to get the ideas a flowin’. Check it out!

I’m a subscriber to Ancestry.com. It’s a paid subscription site that focuses on genealogy, family trees, history etc. They have a really well designed website, with amazing functionality and resources; but that isn’t what I want to show you. They do a killer job on the design of their email. Every time I get one of their messages, I am delighted by the level of attention to detail, design consistency and engaging content.

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Wow, what a day our email group had. Wait, did I say day? I mean week.

While we work with and begrudgingly support Microsoft products this Outlook 2007 is really throwing up some roadblocks. Most recently, anchor tags. Has this always been an issue? To be honest we’re not sure. The anchors work in some emails and not others. What is up with that? Too bad were not scientists and can bust out the beakers, mix together some liquids and create a solution. The rhyme and reason of this latest issue is a mystery.

Our main conundrum is to press on and leave Outlook 2007 behind or modify the entire email to get along with everything. Is the anchor tag a deal breaker?

So we set sail for today and we’ll see what we can come up with tomorrow… stay tuned.