MAILCHIMP
Interactive Photo Essay

When your audience doesn't believe your product is for them, you don't lead with the product—you lead with them

Partnership

Techcrunch

Sector

Products • Services • Lifestyle 

Concept

When clients come to us wanting to show off their shiny new product like it's a Swiss Army knife, and they expect people to care about all seventeen attachments. Nobody cares. Not really. Not until they understand why it matters to their actual life.

I've always believed the best creative work happens when you strip away everything that doesn't matter. And in this case? The product features didn't matter. Not yet. First, we needed these business owners to feel something. To think, "Holy crap, someone actually understands what I'm doing here."

When you show small business owners themselves in these images, you're not interrupting their day with a sales pitch. You're inviting them into a story they already know intimately: their own. That recognition creates an emotional doorway that no list of product benefits ever could.

Strategy

Prioritizing photography over product shots is counterintuitive. That's why it works. While SaaS companies scream about features, we took the opposite approach: We see you. We understand what you're building.

Role

Associate Creative Director: Concept, Design

Impact

Layout Structure

The audience arrives for the story, the grit, the determination, and the real faces of entrepreneurship; the Mailchimp tools become natural extensions of these journeys. 

Keeping it simple wasn't lazy; it was disciplined. Every time you add another message, another CTA, you dilute everything. I wanted one clear throughline: Real businesses. Real challenges. Real tools that help.

The photography does the heavy lifting. Let it. Photographer Cody Cutter captures the moment—that's where the story lives. My job was to build the structure that lets those moments breathe.

Design Structure

I'm not a fan of interactivity for interactivity's sake. But here? It made sense. Each interactive moment is a choice—the reader chooses to go deeper, to learn more, to explore the tools. That choice is everything. It transforms passive consumption into active discovery.

When Cody Cutter and I talked about this shoot, I knew we had something. Real people. Real spaces. No styling team making everything Instagram-perfect. Because that's not what entrepreneurship looks like at 2 AM when you're doing inventory or teaching yourself QuickBooks from YouTube videos.

Design Process

This is the kind of campaign I want to make more of. Not because it's trendy or won awards (though I wouldn't complain), but because it's honest. It treats people like people. It leads with empathy instead of anxiety. It shows instead of tells.

And honestly? In an industry that's increasingly dominated by AI-generated slop and growth-hacking nonsense, making something human feels almost radical.

Credits

Projects 
Ideas
About

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