Email treated with the rigour of a product design system.
Inbox Innovation is run by Douglas Baker. He has spent more than a decade at Burberry, rising from digital designer to the senior leadership team, where he now leads the global design system and the reinvention of the brand’s client communications.
Alongside that, since 2012, he has designed and built email for Uniqlo, Ted Baker, Reformation, Artsy and, since 2018, Maybourne Hotel Group, where seven hotel and residence brands send from one system he built and still maintains.
The two disciplines turned out to be the same problem. A design system gives a product team structure to build within; an email design system gives a marketing team the same thing, in the one channel where rendering is least forgiving and developer time is hardest to get.
The practice exists for one kind of client: brands with several properties, sub-brands or markets, an enterprise ESP, and no developer on the marketing team. The work is to give that team a system they can run, then keep it healthy.
How I work
Structure over decoration
Systems, tokens and tested components first. The brand shows up in the details, not the effects.
The person you brief writes the code
No account layer and no hand-off. You speak to whoever is building it.
Fixed scope, published prices
You know the cost before the first call and the deliverables before you sign.
Accessible by default
WCAG 2.2 AA contrast, real text and dark-mode support in every component, not as an add-on.
The email system behind £XXm of room revenue.
Seven Maybourne hotels, from Claridge’s to the Riviera, send from one component library I built. Yours can too.
- room revenue attributed to email, Maybourne 2024
- £XXm+35% year on year
- campaigns sent across seven hotels
- 161+73% year on year
- of recipients booked, per campaign
- 0.3%3× the benchmark
- Surrenne
Source: Maybourne CRM 2024 performance review. Revenue withheld.