In-house team Est. 2020
Brand & Marketing Design
Our team delivers cohesive, performative “Mailchimp’y” experiences across all of our audience touchpoints—we frame ourselves as Mailchimp’s outcome-oriented center of creative excellence. We’re responsible for Mailchimp’s brand identity evolution and systems, creative campaigns, in-house studio production, and performance creative, supporting almost every corner of the company—most often Brand & Product Marketing teams and our People & Culture teams, as well as our sub-brand properties, product, comms and customer support groups.
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Team Members (33)
(AS OF PUB. DATE: Dec/8/2021)
James Abercrombie
Senior Designer, Brand Design
Carly Aiken
Creative, Campaigns
Paul Byk
Director, Studio Production
Tiffany Chan
Senior Designer, Brand Design
Charlie Cooper
Creative Director, Performance
Chase Curry
Staff Designer, Brand Design
Carlos Escobar
Creative Director, Marketing Design
Kristie Feltner
Sr. Systems Designer, Brand Design
Gavin Godfrey
Senior Writer, Editorial & Content
Jamie Hopper
Sr. Photographer, Studio Production
Tom Hoying
Sr. Motion Designer, Studio Production
Lizzy Johnston
Photography Lead, Studio Production
Jeremy Jones
Lead Creative Director, Campaigns
Brandon Krutzky
Senior Writer, Editorial & Content
Anna Ladson
Senior Designer, Marketing Design
Meg Lindsay
Designer, Brand Design
Zemoria Mathis
Designer, Marketing Design
Alex Miller
Designer, Marketing Design
Monica Misiak
Senior Designer, Marketing Design
Javi Molinos
Creative Director Campaigns (Copy)
Todd Mount
Video Lead, Studio Production
Katie Potochney
Senior Director, Brand & Marketing Design
Austin Ray
Senior Writer, Editorial & Content
Chris Sandlin
Senior Designer, Brand Design
Jane Song
Associate Design Director, Brand Design
Albrica Tierra
Sr. Photographer, Studio Production
Barbara Tushbant
Writer, Editorial & Content
Luke Webster
Designer, Brand Design
Alyson West
Senior Manager, Editorial & Content
Christian Widlic
Lead Creative Director, Brand & Marketing Design
Devin Wistendahl
Associate Designer, Brand Design
Amber Worrell
Associate Creative Director, Campaigns (Art)
Ross Zietz
Design Director, Brand Design
On working in-house…
Benefits
Having internal, centralized creative expertise benefits both the business and our team. As Mailchimp’s in-house creative group, we have shared goals, shared strategy, shared knowledge, and shared rules & resources. This means we’re empowered to creatively solve more business problems than external agencies because we deeply understand the brand, the product, and the customer. Our proximity to the business means we also know the ins-and-outs of how our work is adopted and implemented—in our app, in our paid and owned channels, and even in our culture. Since we are able to contribute more directly to the business, we have license to validate and take bigger creative risks and cumulatively learn from what’s working and what’s not. Overall this dynamic nets out to be a really satisfying and rewarding experience for all of us, not to mention the ways we grow professionally from learning how to build trust with our stakeholders who also happen to be our colleagues.
Challenges
Every individual on the in-house team has to be open to putting in the effort to build trusted relationships with internal partners who help fuel our work, especially if you do ad campaigns like we do. For many marketers, if they have enough ad budget, it’s easier to go to an outside ad agency, who provides an account manager, planners, and other buffers between the client and the creatives. There are almost no buffers when you are doing in-house advertising direct-to-production—this can be great but also can be challenging, especially when trying to protect scope, boundaries, and the creative process, but remaining flexible. Working on an in-house team also presents the unique challenge of keeping things fresh, in terms of seeing the brand from an outside perspective, keeping the quality bar high, and having the humility to know that a project might be better served with external partners, if we don’t have the expertise in-house. Having a team purpose and scope clearly articulated helps us prioritize the work we choose to take on vs. the work that we don’t.
On working with…
Others
We often have outside contractors and creative production agencies contributing to our work in some capacity. Most often we hire freelancers to either augment our team when we are short-staffed or when we lack a specialty in-house that’s required for a project of a certain scale or type. Currently our team ratio is roughly 70/30 full-time to freelance. When we can’t take on a given marketing or digital project, we always recommend vetted creative agencies who we know will deliver top-quality work and whom we trust to be great stewards/interpreters of the Mailchimp brand. We always personally brief our freelancers and production agencies on our brand identity, and stay available to them throughout a project to provide creative oversight.
Guidelines
Brand guidelines are essential for our daily work—and we’ve found that their format matters. The traditional 100+ page guidelines PDF was usually ignored, hard to decipher, and really unwieldy for onboarding partners, freelancers and external production agencies. Instead we’ve packaged our brand identity system, which we call “Wink”, into a robust internal site that’s user-friendly for a broad audience, and also houses our web app components, content strategy frameworks, and voice and tone guidance. Having Wink helps us all work faster, avoid miscommunications, onboard new employees, settle creative disagreements and scale Mailchimp brand knowledge more easily.
Integrated Advertising campaign directed by Eric Wareheim (from comedy duo Tim and Eric), featuring a series of imaginary brands inspired by the businesses that use Mailchimp. The creative team had under a week to develop the identities of all of these brands. And when it came to production, they had just five days to not only shoot the filmed elements of the campaign, but also a series of photoshoots for each ‘brand’. The campaign plays off of the insight that small businesses are so much more than just their label and Mailchimp has the tools to help them grow and succeed both as a business and as a person. See more about this campaign here.
Advertising campaign supporting the launch of Mailchimp’s new Free Ecommerce Stores offering. The campaign replaced the word Free with Mailchimp Store across popular phrases that used the words Free since Mailchimp Stores and the word “Free” now mean essentially the same thing. From spots the featured Free as a Bird”m flying penguins to Buy One Get One Free moments to a romantic couple finding love by setting each other Mailchimp Stores. It was a breakthrough campaign that was the first for Mailchimp’s inhouse team and one not to be missed. See more about this campaign here.
Immersive event that turned the ordinary tech booth into a unique interactive 3D experience with projection mapping. The vision was to create something educational but also visually striking to communicate how all of our tools work together to create the ultimate marketing machine for small businesses.The idea was to use a Rube Goldberg machine to visually tell the story of how our products work. The booth design used projection mapping to play animations that would trigger the next step with an activated button. This was a fully integrated effort with social promotions, a webinar, and branded promotional moments. We designed a coffee truck as well as some limited edition enamel pins. The goal was to stand out amongst the other tech companies. Safe to say we accomplished that. See more about this project here.
An homage to an old classic where users can play as a young Freddie IV delivering postcards for the family business. Overcome obstacles, both physical and metaphorical, as you learn the values of hard work, dedication and quicksand-avoidance. Play the game here.
An arcade style game where you play a cat living in a corner shop. There’s lots to be done to keep the business afloat. For starters, there’s a vending machine on the fritz, spewing fire and lobbing snacks at you. Fix it up and earn some coins along the way to maybe get yourself something nice to wear. Play the game here.
A 1980s mall-themed pop-up shop showcasing goods from our small business customers. From ceramic dinnerware made in the Blue Ridge Mountains, to chic showercaps that you’ll actually look forward to wearing, Mailchimp sold and marketed goods from several customers, including Arbor Teas, Areaware, Baron Fig, and SHHHOWERCAP. See more about this project here.
Annual Report taking readers on a journey through brightly colored streets, offices and stores to discover some enlightening stats about the year gone by. See the annual report here.
Mailchimp Identity Rebrand with an updated logo, wordmark, typeface, colors, and imagery like photography and illustrations. We also evolved from “MailChimp” to “Mailchimp” with a lowercase c. Our name began as a playful metaphor: a chimp who delivers your mail. These days we do so much more than that, and our name stands for more than its component parts. See more about the rebrand here.
A custom typeface created in partnership with Commercial Type. The new typeface straddles the line between Expert and Absurdist. See more about the typeface here.
An online store and custom swag, the Rainbow Room is part of Mailchimp’s Reward and Recognition program, which allows employees to get limited-edition swag created by our world-class designers. See more about this project here.
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