A new show needed email, and there was already a template to build on. I took the agency-built Marketo template from Source Fashion, redesigned it for its new sister show, Source Home & Gift, and handed the email team a kit they could run campaigns from. The same format then carried the rest of Hyve’s shows.
Role Visual redesign and code adaptation · Client Hyve Group · Platform Marketo · Tools Adobe XD, Figma · Year 2022
The situation
Source Home & Gift was a new show, and its marketing manager needed emails. The request came to me through the email automation team: a template the show could run its campaigns from.
There was already a working starting point. An external agency had built a modular Marketo template for Source Fashion, a sister show. Starting again would have meant designing, coding and testing a second template from nothing, for a show that needed to start sending.
Three decisions
Change the values, not the code. The Source Fashion code already did the hard parts of email: 25 modules, two mobile breakpoints, and text over photographs that still shows in Outlook. Almost everything in it is a setting rather than hard-coded, so the new show went in as values: its colours, logos and images, working to the brand guidelines set by Hyve’s head of design. I redesigned the visuals in Adobe XD, moved the design into Figma, and left the tested structure alone.
Rhythm in the grids. In the two-, three- and four-pod rows, I alternated the cards between white and plum. Each card takes its own background colour, so it is the same module and the same code, but a long product list stops reading as a wall of identical tiles.
Crop sizes printed on every image slot. Each placeholder carries its own dimensions: 620 x 190 for the banner, 280 x 200 for a two-pod image, 130 x 130 for a four-pod thumbnail. I added them for the email team, so they know what to crop before opening Photoshop, and nothing arrives at the wrong ratio and gets squashed.
One template, two shows
The same modules carrying two different brands: Source Home & Gift in plum, sand and blush, and Pure London in black, pink and yellow. Same headers, buttons, banner, register pod and pod grids, from top to footer, re-skinned through settings rather than rebuilt.
How it works
Hand-coded HTML tables in Marketo. The template has 25 modules and 59 settings a marketer can change without touching code, 58 of them scoped to a single module. There are two breakpoints, at 640px and 479px.
Three modules put text over a photograph: the banner, the register pod and the main hero. Outlook ignores CSS background images, so each of these has a VML fallback, plus a slider for the image height Outlook should use. The pod modules have a switch to show or hide the button and a dropdown for text alignment, so one module covers several layouts. The type is Poppins, with Arial forced in Outlook, which cannot load web fonts.
The result
The format did not stay with one show. The rest of Hyve’s portfolio went on to reuse the same template, each show re-skinned in its own colours and type, Pure London among them. I left Hyve around this time, so I don’t have send volumes or performance figures to quote.
What I’d do differently
The code has no dark mode handling, and only 8 of its 29 images carry alt text. I was adapting an existing build rather than starting a new one, so both stayed as they were. Today I would treat them as part of the adaptation, not as extras, because they are cheap to add while the code is open and expensive to retrofit across every show that inherits it.
If you need email templates a marketing team can run without a developer, I’m open to permanent and freelance roles. alessio@golfetto.uk
