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Email Design and Storytelling With Alps & Meters

Learn how using the drag‑and‑drop feature helps the vintage outerwear company master their messaging.

Hero image for Issue #95: Featuring Alps & Meters

When Louis Joseph went on a snowy skiing adventure in a Swedish village 15 years ago, little did he know it would alter his life forever. “I discovered a vintage ski sweater that changed the way I thought about performance outerwear,” he says.

“The sweater’s classic knitwear presentation felt like a direct connection to the history of alpine sport,” he continues. “It seemed to me that the threads of the piece were woven with a romantic sensibility that conveyed both an authenticity and timelessness as old as skiing itself.”

Louis left Sweden with that one-of-a-kind garment, and everywhere he traveled (Colorado, Canada, Austria, Argentina, and New Zealand, to name a few), people asked about his sweater. When he met Nick Sapia, Louis’ story resonated with the fellow skier. And as they got to know each other, the duo saw the opportunity to create beautiful, timeless outerwear. Together, they created Alps & Meters.

Here’s how they’ve woven their unique story into their brand:

“It’s a big part of what we do at Alps & Meters,” says Nick, Chief Digital Officer. “At the foundation of every product we make or story we write on our blog, we want to convey a strong sense of tradition through the images and words that we use.”

Not only is their journal beautifully designed, it highlights ski destinations that are wonderful for solo trips or family ventures. They also cover other skiing-related topics, like classic cars or the man behind resort maps. Every snowy image conjures up the desire for warmth, which, in turn, makes their products even more appealing to readers.

“The main benefit of email design with Mailchimp is that we can make our emails look a lot better than the technical expertise that we have,” says Nick.

“The drag-and-drop feature allows us to quickly and easily rearrange different elements in the email,” he says. “We do a lot of experimentation to find what format works best, and once we find that, we save those as a template and we then can easily edit it from there.”

It’s also very easy to load their custom color palette and custom fonts so they can immediately make their emails feel like an extension of their website. And because their stories are so picture-heavy, the image grid comes in handy, too.

“That’s an example where even the smallest thing saves us a lot of time and really makes it easy to lay out the emails,” Nick says. “Images are always in different sizes, so to be able to press one button and automatically resize every image in the grid so that it looks correct is just a small thing, but the little things really add up to save us a lot of time and efficiently send our emails out.”

Because their luxury sportswear has a lot of advantages over other brands, Alps & Meters has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to their products. To do so, they use Mailchimp automations to send out an onboarding series of emails to welcome new customers. (They also use abandoned cart automations to bring back customers who left something behind.)

“As a new brand, there are a lot of things we want to convey in our first interactions with our fans. We want to share the story behind the brand and products, as well as their technical benefits,” Nick says. “There’s a lot of education to do with new brand followers, and automation allows us to bring a new fan onboard in the way that best works for them.”

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