Article

Article: turning one-off emails into a template system

Article is a modern furniture brand that sells direct to customers online. Their email was already running in Iterable, but it had grown as a series of individual builds rather than a system — every new send started more or less from scratch. We worked alongside the in-house team from 2019 into 2021 to put a foundation under it: a style guide, a master template, and the lifecycle and campaign emails built on top.

Foundations first

An email style guide set the brand rules specific to email — type, colour, spacing and image dimensions — so later decisions had something to refer back to instead of being re-argued each time.

Every new email then started as a wireframe rather than a design: laid out at desktop and mobile widths, with the reasoning for the layout written alongside it. Where the structure was genuinely open, the team got two or three wireframed options to choose between instead of one proposal to react to. Agreement happened at the cheapest possible stage.

A grid system followed, with a set of layout variations, so new emails could be composed from known arrangements rather than designed from nothing each time.

Master template and block library

One hand-coded master template became the base for every send, with a library of code snippets for the recurring pieces. Iterable’s template options were weighed up before settling on an approach, and builds were assembled and reviewed in a sandbox account before anything reached production. On that foundation we designed and built:

• Lifecycle — a welcome series, abandoned cart, wishlist, stock alerts and order confirmation
• Customer experience — review requests that pull in customer photos, and a thank-you follow-up
• Campaigns — product launches, sale and Black Friday sends, and seasonal editorial emails
• Motion — animated GIFs and cinemagraphs, weighted to stay inbox-friendly

Rendering and dark mode

Templates were rendering-tested before release, with results shared back to the team. Dark mode was checked on real devices rather than simulated: where a layout inverted badly, the fix went into the template and was re-checked against the same device, so the correction carried to every email built from it.

Documentation and handover

Each module was documented with its image dimensions and the thinking behind its layout, so the in-house team could build new emails from the template without coming back for a design pass. The template stayed in service well past the engagement — we returned in 2024 to rebuild the footer and repair a handful of assets, which is the real test of whether a system was built to last.