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Premium lighting brand orchestrating a sophisticated email ecosystem that educates, reassures, and builds community across the entire customer journey.
Flow 1: Abandoned Cart & Browse Recovery
Dutton Brown | The Gentle Persuasion Series
Three distinct angles on cart recovery, each with different psychology. The first emphasizes taste validation ("You have good taste"), building confidence in their choice. The second addresses hesitation with social proof and reassurance ("Still thinking it over?"). The third creates urgency without pressure ("Lost look. No pressure"), acknowledging sunk time investment. Each email includes customer testimonials, product details, and trust signals (handcrafted in Minneapolis, 2-year warranty, free shipping). The tone is warm and understanding, recognizing that premium fixture purchases are thoughtful decisions, not impulse buys.
Strategic Angle: Recovers high-value carts by addressing specific psychological barriers at each stage of hesitation.
Flow 2: Order Journey & Delight Sequence
Dutton Brown | The Craftsmanship Story
From "It's officially in the making" through delivery and beyond, this sequence transforms transactional updates into storytelling opportunities. Emails celebrate the production process ("Your fixture is handcrafted in our Minneapolis studio"), build anticipation ("Good things take a little time"), and deliver the payoff ("There it is"). Post-delivery, the flow pivots to community building, encouraging customers to share their space, leave reviews, and discover complementary products. Every touchpoint reinforces the brand's commitment to quality and craftsmanship.
Strategic Angle: Turns fulfillment into a brand experience that builds loyalty and organic advocacy.
Flow 3: Welcome & Repeat Customer Reactivation
Dutton Brown | The Educational Onboarding
New subscribers get a gentle introduction: shop by collection, explore by style/finish, learn how to coordinate lighting and hardware. The series educates without selling hard, positioning Dutton Brown as a design partner. For repeat customers, a win-back flow celebrates their loyalty ("Welcome back," "You've done it again") and previews new collections. A signature email invites them to "show us your space", leveraging user-generated content while making customers feel like part of the brand's design community.
Strategic Angle: Builds brand authority through education while deepening customer relationships through belonging and recognition.
The network for creativity
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Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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DPLNK is a design practice built around one simple idea: brands become stronger when everything connects.
Strategy connects with identity.
Identity connects with expression.
Expression connects with people.
The name reflects that principle — a visual system reduced to its essential link between idea and perception.
No unnecessary layers. No decoration for the sake of it. Just purposeful design, built to make brands feel clear, distinctive, and connected.
This is the kind of work I want to create more of.
If you’re building a brand that deserves that level of intention, let’s talk.
Amazing work!
A few highlights from part of my fav projects I’ve worked on over the past few years. Some of them are brand identity, some websites+brand identity products.
Different industries and different stages, but the goal was always the same: build crispy, flexible visual systems that scale cleanly from screens to physical materials.
Watching the best design of the day.
I built the Smooch brand from the ground up, strategy, identity, wordmark, colour world. The can was the last piece, the moment it finally became something real.
The brief: a packaging system that scales. One hero flavour today, a full range tomorrow, no rebuild required.
First problem, the logo. Smooch's bold wordmark has a curve underneath it that dies at full width on a can, and angling it across felt gimmicky, not confident. So I turned it vertical instead, running the full height, full scale.
Colour had to carry the brand and split the flavours at once. Deep burgundy anchors it, red punches through the wordmark, and each flavour gets its own accent, blush, gold, peach.
No fruit photography. Instead, a graphic starburst holding a simple illustrated fruit, ownable and ready for whatever flavour comes next.
The back label carried ingredients, actives, and every mandatory without losing the premium tone.
Going vertical also quietly solved the shelf problem: cans sit in a fridge door at a slight angle and a horizontal wordmark rotates out of legibility, whereas a full-height one still reads from either side. Curious whether the starburst has a fixed point count across flavours or...