Yes, that Airbnb. Their policy team—the folks who deal with governments, regulations, and stakeholder communications—needed a better way to send monthly updates to important people worldwide.
The existing setup was a mess of one-off emails cobbled together each month. They wanted something reusable, something that looked properly Airbnb, and something their team could update without involving engineers.
Airbnb's brand guidelines are... thorough. Specific fonts, specific spacing, specific shades of that coral pink. Getting it pixel-perfect in an email is harder than it sounds.
We built a modular template system in Mailchimp. Think of it like Lego blocks—each section (header, text block, image grid, call-to-action) is a reusable component the team can arrange however they need.
The tricky bit was the progressive enhancement. Modern email clients get the full Airbnb experience—custom fonts, proper spacing, all the polish. But when some government minister opens the email in Outlook 2010 on their work laptop, it still looks professional. Not identical, but professional.
We also built in localisation from the start. These emails go to stakeholders across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Right-to-left text support, different date formats, that kind of thing.
The policy team went from spending days on each newsletter to spending hours. The templates have been in continuous use since 2019, which in email-template-years is basically forever.
Honestly, the best part was the brief. "Make it look like Airbnb" is much easier than "we're not sure what we want but we'll know it when we see it."
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