Hairburst’s Flawless Email Design

By | | Categories: Case Studies
Case study - Hairburst
⏱ 8 minute read
hairburst logo

Hairburst's Flawless Email Design:

9 Languages, 11 Markets, Perfect Brand

Beautiful Emails in Any Language

As they expanded steadily across European markets, Hairburst faced a critical challenge: their email production process couldn't keep pace with their growth ambitions. Manual translation workflows, design bottlenecks, and non-email friendly design systems were holding back their international expansion and retention strategies.

 

Hairburst sample email designs

Look at Hairburst's emails. Clean typography. Perfect product shots. Sophisticated split-screen layouts. Before/after transformations with localized text overlays. The kind of visual execution you'd expect from a premium beauty brand. Now realize these exact designs work seamlessly across English, Romanian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and five other languages.

By partnering with Dyspatch, Hairburst transformed their email operations. They eliminated design dependencies, streamlined localization across multiple markets, and empowered their CRM team to move at the speed of their business. 

And here’s the twist: No designer touches their emails. "We don't rely on design at all. We don't brief in anything," says Jess Ormston, Senior CRM Manager. Yet their emails look just as iconic as they did when their graphic design team hand-crafted each one in Figma.

With Dyspatch, Hairburst Built a Design System, Not Emails

Instead of creating individual emails, Hairburst invested upfront in an expansive library of design-approved, fully QA’d templates and Blueprints. They included custom blocks for split-product displays, dynamic before/after modules to showcase the results for their products, and typography that scales across Hungarian's sprawl and English's compression.

Hairburst sample emails

Amelia Growdon, CRM Executive, who builds these emails daily, was keen to move away from coding: "I just find the blocks a lot easier to use than full HTML. It definitely makes it a lot easier to be more creative and dynamic.

The Numbers Don't Lie

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100% reduction in design team dependency for email production


Unified email operations across the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Czechia, Poland, and more

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Eliminated weeks-long production cycles, now building emails on demand

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Enabled brand refresh across all email touchpoints without resource strain

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Positioned for continued expansion with scalable localization infrastructure

The Turning Point: International Growth Hitting a Wall

After finding significant success expanding into Europe during the early years of the business, the team at Hairburst were spread thin as their list of territories expanded. Their email production process, which was built for a single market, wasn’t going to scale with their growth.

Jess Ormston, Hairburst’s Senior CRM manager who led the Dyspatch implementation, recalls her success in new markets, but emphasized how thinly stretched resources had become across territories. The team desperately needed something to help unify their processes.

 

“We see Dyspatch as being a really key part of our internationalization strategy. It makes the process of building out emails across 11 territories in nine languages a lot more straightforward.”

Rory Armitage-Burns
 Head of Data, Platforms & AI at Hairburst

As Hairburst’s international presence was growing, the pain points were mounting:

Localization Pains

  • In-house international team manually translated every email 
  • Designs created in Figma had to be bespoke to each email, and would frequently break after translation. Hungarian text, for example, could be significantly longer, skewing carefully crafted layouts
  • Deployment was tricky through a patchwork of Iterable and Excel spreadsheets

Design Bottlenecks 

  • Every single email required a full designer brief
  • Designers had to create and splice each email manually
  • Extended back-and-forth on technical email limitations slowed growth

Complex Personalization Needed

  • Sophisticated segmentation required for successful campaigns (hair type, hair concern, subscriber vs. one-time purchaser)
  • Growing premium product line (Advanced Plus) demanded educational flows, refill reminders, and retention-focused cancellation sequences

The opportunity came during a brand refresh. Internally, the team wanted to align all email communications with their new branding standards, but the existing process made this feel insurmountable for their existing email stack. 

They needed a living email design system that would adapt to their needs, and not require a designer to help them every time the team had a marketing breakthrough that they wanted to execute on immediately. 

Why Dyspatch

The search for a solution was thorough. Led by Jess Ormston, Senior CRM Manager, and Rory Armitage-Burns, Head of Data, Platforms & AI, the team evaluated multiple platforms against their must-haves:

Hairburst’s Non-Negotiable Requirements:

  • A template-based system that could handle variable text lengths across languages
  • Design flexibility that would convey their iconic brand vision without compromise
  • Marketer-friendly (no HTML knowledge required)
  • Ability to maintain sophisticated branding during rapid production

Through extensive research, the team found that Dyspatch was the only tool that could accomplish all their requirements.

“Dyspatch is the best platform I've seen email template wise to be able to work with and have customizations. We felt like 99% of what we wanted was possible when working with the team at Dyspatch.”

Jess Ormston
Senior CRM manager at Hairburst

What sealed the decision? The team noted that there weren't any significant limitations or areas requiring compromise. The brand team could achieve exactly what they envisioned, something that would have been impossible on any other platform. Dyspatch didn’t just make Hairburst’s emails easier to produce, it made them repeatable, global, and reliably beautiful.

The Solution in Action

The transformation in Hairburst’s workflows was immediate and dramatic. Where the team once waited days or weeks for designer availability, they now build sophisticated, on-brand emails in hours.

Before Dyspatch:

  • Designer briefing required for every email
  • Full design and technical splice needed
  • Weeks-long production cycles
  • 100% dependent on design and development resources

After Dyspatch:

  • The team has complete independence from design team, and the design team has signed off on every module in Dyspatch: every email is design-approved
  • The CRM team builds emails autonomously
  • The team build emails 10x faster, without compromising on their iconic design
  • Their retention metrics are skyhigh

Email Design Showcase: Anatomy of a Hairburst Email

Most companies think design excellence requires designers on every project. Hairburst proved the opposite: Great design comes from great systems, not great meetings.

Their brand team created the vision, and their UX team translated it to web standards. With Dyspatch, their iconic brand vision was codified into re-usable email blocks. Now their CRM team executes flawlessly across 9 languages and 11 locales without waiting for approvals.

Hairburst email block library

Amelia Growdon, Senior CRM Executive at Hairburst, walked us through two standout examples of how the team uses Dyspatch to create sophisticated, on-brand emails without design or development support. These examples showcase the power of custom blocks, live text localization, and rapid iteration capabilities that transformed their workflow.

Email 1: New Product Launch - Shampoo & Conditioner

Design Breakdown

hairbust email breakdown

The Challenge They Solved:
Hairburst needed a visually compelling way to showcase paired products (shampoo and conditioner) alongside a complementary product (hair mask) while maintaining their brand guidelines and equal visual weight.

The custom split product block was specifically requested by Hairburst during implementation, something that would typically be impossible on most template-based or drag and drop editor platforms. Jess's reaction says it all:

“Most places you would go to and ask for that, they would say not on a template... especially not on a template where our team's quite restricted in terms of HTML.

 I really enjoy this block that we've got here that showcases the split products: We've got the the breakdown of what the products are, and then underneath we promote the mask.”

Jess Ormston
Senior CRM manager at Hairburst

Email 2: Customer Journey - Before & After Showcase

Hairburst email breakdown before and after block

Results & Impact

Design Team Liberation

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100% elimination of design dependency for new emails

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Production time reduced from weeks to hours

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CRM team output increased while reducing resource requirements

Operational Transformation

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Unified operations across 4+ markets (UK, France, Italy, Spain)

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Single platform replaced 3+ fragmented tools (Figma, Excel, Iterable)

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AI-powered localization eliminated manual translation bottlenecks

Team Empowerment

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Zero HTML knowledge required for sophisticated email production

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Marketers build and iterate independently

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International expansion no longer limited by email production capacity

Retention & Personalization Success

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Launched sophisticated hair-type segmentation at scale

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Deployed Advanced Plus premium product flows with educational content

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Built multi-tier subscription retention programs previously impossible

The Competitive Edge

Beyond metrics, Dyspatch fundamentally changed how the team at Hairburst collaborates.

The CRM team now builds emails spontaneously without waiting for designers and developers. Marketers have freedom to build and design quickly, testing and iterating in the live platform. One team member noted she often creates variations without even thinking about the process, it's become that intuitive.

“Our process beforehand in terms of design was entirely different. It would be an image that would be spliced up, which is obviously not best practice either and also very time consuming.”

Jess Ormston
Senior CRM Manager at Hairburst

This autonomy transformed the CRM team from order-takers dependent on other departments to strategic executors who can test, learn, and iterate at the speed of their ideas. By abstracting technical elements into blocks, Dyspatch gave the team unprecedented creative freedom, bridging what used to be a strict divide between companies that used designers versus developers for email production.

The Business Impact

Most brands face an impossible choice: beautiful emails or global scale. Hairburst refused to choose.

They didn't just maintain their design standards across 9 languages—they actually improved them as they scaled. Their emails got more sophisticated even after they no longer needed a designer to create a bespoke email every time. Their emails also became more dynamic after they embraced using Blueprints and templates.

"There didn't really need to be a compromise," confirms Rory Armitage-Burns. "The brand team wanted to do things that on any other platform we wouldn't have been able to do."

And the kicker is that what took weeks now takes hours. Black Friday campaigns that used to require month-long lead times are now built same-day, empowering their team to move quickly with new business intel or creative ideas. "Our processes have improved like tenfold. We can put out more with less resources," Ormston confirms.

Key Takeaways

For brands like Hairburst scaling their email operations internationally:

  1. Template flexibility without design compromise is possible:
    You don't have to choose between brand excellence and production speed.Hairburst found Dyspatch to be the best email template platform they'd seen for customization work, enabling 99% of what they wanted to achieve.

  2. Localization should be infrastructure, not manual labor:
    Responsive templates and AI translations eliminate the translation-breaks-design problem.

  3. Marketer autonomy drives business agility:
    When CRM teams can execute without dependencies, the entire business moves faster. Teams with limited HTML knowledge can still produce sophisticated emails.

  4. Design team liberation benefits everyone:
    Designers focus on strategy and brand evolution, marketers execute tactical campaigns. The smooth integration process speaks to thoughtful product design.

  5. The right platform enables sophisticated personalization at scale:
    With production bottlenecks removed, teams can finally build the customer journeys they've envisioned.

Hairburst proved that great email design isn't about removing obstacles. It's about building systems that make beautiful emails repeatable, scalable, and language-agnostic.

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