In my role as Associate Creative Director of Visual Design for Product (that’s a mouthful), one of my responsibilities was figuring out how to take the ever-evolving Chewy brand and apply it in practical ways. When I joined the team, one of the first requests was to design a way for the order number to be more visible to customers on transactional emails. That way, when they call Customer Service, they’re able to find it quickly. While that would’ve been an easy problem to solve, I questioned if there was a way to provide customers with enough information about their order so that they don’t need to contact Customer Service at all.

This led to a complete overhaul of our transactional email language. Instead of just piling information in one long email, I created a modular system of elements that could be modified and added to depending on the situation.

By updating the order confirmation, shipping confirmation, and delivery confirmation, my team reduced calls to Customer Service and increased customer understanding of what was happening with their order.

Below is a sample email flow that is relatively indicative of the average customer experience. By reorganizing the information, we made the emails more scannable and even were able to create places of surprise & delight by incorporating animated GIFs into the shipping and delivery emails.

This design approach has been almost fully rolled out to all 120+ transactional emails that Chewy sends to customers.