Most companies treat email as a container. Copy goes in, a button goes at the bottom, and the template does the rest. The Frankford 2027 lookbook email needed to do something harder. It had to introduce a legacy brand's more luxurious direction to retailers, and it had to do it on a canvas that collapses to a phone screen. We asked Aarnav Patel, JWC's email designer, how he approached it.

What did the brief ask for, and what did the first version look like before you started pushing on it?

I needed to make an email to hype the new Frankford 2027 lookbook while emphasizing their new brand as a more luxury legacy company. The layouts stayed pretty consistent across iterations. The biggest challenge was finding the right photography to match the audience and the copy.

Who is this email for, and what's the one thing they should do after opening it? How did that shape the layout?

The email was targeted at Frankford's retailer customers, inviting them to check out the new umbrella catalog in a home and restaurant context. I wanted the layout to showcase the product photography in a way that felt unique across the email, so every photo felt fresh and nothing distracted from it. That meant fewer colors and a more chic, editorial layout.

Email is a tough canvas. What constraints did you design around, and how did you make sure a phone skimmer still gets the point fast?

The most important element is the button. The whole job is designing layouts that make the buttons clear and worth clicking. I can have more fun with the desktop layouts, but I always have to keep in mind how everything collapses on mobile. The goal is a single scroll where the buttons still stand out.

Where did the visual direction come from? What did you keep from the brand, and where did you push past it?

The most distinct part of Frankford's brand is the umbrella logo, especially set against the harsh grids of most email layouts. I wanted to play into the strong visual of the umbrella ruffles, so I blew up the logo into unique image frames and gave the quotes and text sections a fringed edge.

Pick one detail most people will never notice but you sweated anyway. Why does it matter?

The fringed image section. Do you know how crazy I was getting trying to match a sine wave Figma plugin to the logo? The logo is cyclical, so each curve had to be intentional, and it had to cut off exactly at the bottom of a curve on either end for symmetry. A wave pattern can very easily become cheesy and out of place if it does not match the brand. I gave it the time and care it needed so it felt like part of the brand rather than a decoration on top of it.

What changed most between the first draft and the final, and what did test sends catch that looked fine in Figma?

Images. Frankford has so many beautiful shots of their umbrellas that choosing the right ones took real help. I loved matching images to the copy in fun ways. For the section about what is "worth bringing home," I knew it had to be the red umbrella over the two pool chairs. It was romantic. It felt like introducing a partner to the family.

The test sends caught something else. We realized we had only one button in the entire email, and we needed to surface one earlier, toward the top.

If a company's emails look fine but don't perform, what's the first thing you'd check?

On the design side, it goes back to the buttons. That is the main metric I feel I have control over. Once someone opens the email, the design is what leads them to click and engage. If an email is not performing, I would push for ways to emphasize the button: give it more space, increase its size, or reduce the copy around it.

Aarnav Patel designs email for JWC. The Frankford 2027 lookbook email went out to Frankford Umbrellas' retail partners in November 2026. More Behind the Screens coming soon.