A personalized email program and component design system for Smith Optics

Smith’s emails treated a lifelong skier and a first-time cyclist exactly the same.

Smith Optics makes goggles, sunglasses, and helmets for people who are serious about one or two sports and indifferent to the rest. The email program did not reflect that. Everyone got the same sends, so returning-visitor traffic from email sat near 22 percent against a category benchmark closer to 52 percent over the May to July 2020 window. This project reworked the program around what each customer actually does. It set a personalization approach keyed to sport interest and purchase history, then built a component-based email design system so the team could assemble tailored templates quickly instead of designing each send from scratch. Visual concepts put the strategy on the page: a welcome email that learns which sports a new customer cares about, and a post-purchase email where every module is chosen to match the sport of the last order.

Closing the gap to the category benchmark was worth roughly $500k a quarter.

Bringing Smith’s 22 percent returning-visitor rate up to the category’s 52 percent would have meant around 28,000 more returning visits over that quarter. At an average of about 11 dollars in revenue per returning visitor from email, that is an estimated $500k of quarterly uplift the old program was leaving on the table. The design system was what made it hold: relevance the team could keep shipping, not a redesign that ages out in a season.