Scaling an American Icon from West to East
Program
Global Digital Design
Client
Tory Burch
Results
YoY Email Marketing CVR increase
1 Global Email Design System
2nd biggest Fashion Tmall launch
Challenge
Tory Burch operates seasonal fashion cycles across multiple markets, each with distinct audience behaviors and platform norms. The brand needed a unified digital creative strategy capable of supporting major seasonal campaigns across email, brand.com, paid media, and T-Mall (China). The existing creative execution lacked scalable consistency, slowing production, diluting brand impact, and making it harder to optimize performance across channels and regions.
Before (above)
Strategy
The initiative repositioned digital creative as a data-informed design system that could support global campaigns while maintaining local relevance. The strategic focus was on building scalable frameworks that would:
Establish a Global Email Design System to streamline creative production, improve performance, and maintain consistent brand expression.
Leverage performance data and multivariate testing to optimize templates and creative components over time.
Support regional engagement, especially in China, by aligning creative output across WeChat and T-Mall platforms.
This approach emphasized design systems over one-off executions, enabling creative teams to produce work that was both operationally efficient and strategically adaptable.
After (above)
Email Design System (above) optimized from regular performance data insights and multi-variant testing. These components and templates improved overall design speed, planning and production as well as governed global consistency.
Execution
Execution centered on blending design discipline with data insights and process governance:
Team leadership of creative designers and art directors responsible for building seasonal assets across email, brand.com, paid display, and T-Mall channels. justinedwards.net
Development of a data-linked email design system, incorporating regular performance data and multivariate testing to refine components and templates over time. justinedwards.net
Alignment with product design streams (e.g., Gemini Design System) to ensure coherence across omnichannel customer journeys.
Visual work included creative outputs for Spring/Summer 2018 (brand.com, email marketing, paid display), Fall/Winter, and Spring/Summer 2019 campaigns, each designed to be both brand-cohesive and regionally localized.
SS18 Campaign brand.com Creative
SS18 Campaign Email Marketing Creative
SS18 Campaign Paid Display Creative
FW18 Campaign brand.com and Email Marketing Creative
SS19 Campaign brand.com Creative
Results
Year-over-Year Email Conversion Lift: Through template optimization and data testing, the email design system delivered measurable improvements in campaign performance, with open rates in the 10–18% range and conversions around 0.3–0.4% on a list of roughly 5 million subscribers.
Established 1 Global Email Design System: This replaced disparate design approaches with a single, reusable, data-driven system that sped up planning, production, and deployment across markets. justinedwards.net
2nd Most Successful Fashion T-Mall Launch (at the time): The coordinated T-Mall creative launch, enabled by the design system, achieved one of the highest performance results for a fashion brand on the platform.
These outcomes were underpinned by ongoing optimization cycles using performance data and a governance framework that maintained brand integrity while supporting adaptability.
Tory Burch on TMall (above)
Executive Summary
The Data and Design program for Tory Burch demonstrates how creative leadership can bridge design excellence with performance impact at global scale. By embedding data-informed design systems and performance feedback loops into creative operations, the initiative not only improved email marketing results and platform performance but also created a repeatable framework for future seasonal campaigns across channels and regions. This shift from one-off creative production to systems-centric design enabled both efficiency and cultural relevance in a fast-moving fashion ecosystem.
Team Credits: Tory Burch editorial team, Sarah Stark, Laura Mujico, Jenny Kong, Nicole Wang, Nick Specht
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