Sew True is a company specializing in the supply of everything required by the fashion and apparel business across the United States. They are based in the Fashion District in New York. They supply everything from thread to dress forms and sewing machines.

With a diverse customer base ranging from solo-creators to large-scale manufacturers, Sew True has a loyal mailing list base of some 20,000 people, with a standard open rate of 60% and click through rate of 15% (which is very high). However, the existing mailer was poorly created and inconsistent, which made it time-consuming to create each week and difficult for potential customers to see what was most relevant to them.

Having decided that they needed to update their primary means of communicating their offerings, as well as expanding their mailing base, Sew True approached okellydesign to redesign their existing newsletter so that it could be easily updated from week to week, as well as showing their various product lines in a coherent manner.

The redesign focussed on two areas. Firstly, on the design itself, ensuring that the informational hierarchy was correct and that the products were shown consistently and in an engaging manner. Secondly, it was important to design the mailer in such a way that its content could be changed from week to week without affecting the overall design, and that it work as a template on their email database to allow the content to be changed in a fraction of the time that it had previously taken them.

As they had built their previous emailers themselves, it often happened that the email would not preview for customers, thus losing them business. A primary concern was that this emailer be coded correctly, with a robust structure, in order to allow it be cleared by all the major email clients and thus preview for customers.

Having ensured that the emailer would be visible to recipients, I then set about the design itself. The design builds on the existing website design of the Sew True website, which is very familiar to their customers, which ensures that recipients will recognize the email and not mark it as spam. The content is organized to ensure that the most important elements will be visible in all mailboxes (fitting within the minimum 250x x 250px guaranteed area), in this case the senders logo and the offering.

The products were organized into a single, unified section, with each acting as a direct link to that product page. The details of the offering come below those then, along with the necessary codes and details on how to redeem the offer online.

The newly added footer contains all the details to ensure that Sew True remains compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, of which they had (unwittingly) been in violation with their previous emailers. As this emailer was designed to be sent to many new recipients, it was important that they be able to see exactly who it was from and unsubscribe easily if they so wished.

Lastly, I worked with the owners to redesign the main site masthead to incorporate an email sign-up form (which had not been present previously), a simple change to effect a notable increase in sign-ups to the mailing list, and thus the potential customer base.