You know that feeling when you step into a well-run kitchen? Everything is prepped, ingredients are laid out, and the chef moves effortlessly from one step to the next. That’s the power of mise en place—a French culinary term meaning “everything in its place.”
But what if I told you the same principle applies to email production?
I’m Annett Forcier, founder and managing director of EmailBoutique.io. While my career today is in email design systems, my journey started in a completely different place—the kitchen. I trained as a pastry chef, working in a small family bakery for three years before an allergy to grain flour forced me to pivot. That led me to web design and, eventually, email development.
And just like in the kitchen, a structured, well-prepared process is the secret ingredient to high-quality, scalable email production.
Most email production workflows I’ve encountered over the years follow a linear approach:
On paper, this seems logical. But in reality, it’s a recipe for disaster—or at least for inefficiencies and errors.
🔹 Emails are approved before a developer even sees them.
🔹 Design decisions don’t account for dark mode, rendering quirks, or responsive behavior.
🔹 QA gets rushed or skipped, leading to broken emails.
And when time is short? Teams resort to copying an old email, tweaking the content, and sending it out. This is what I call the Frankenstein Email—a patched-up version of past campaigns, complete with inherited (and unnoticed) rendering issues.
The result?
🚨 Broken layouts.
🚨 Inconsistent branding.
🚨 Rendering failures across different inboxes.
Instead of the traditional, disjointed approach, I advocate for a structured, system-based workflow—one that follows four key principles:
The heart of my process is a design system built in Figma—a visual library of reusable components, color schemes, grid structures, and typography.
👉 Watch this video to see how mise en place transforms workflows—not just in the kitchen, but in all aspects of production:
📌 What’s included?
✅ A structured grid system to ensure responsive layouts.
✅ Pre-designed buttons, headers, and sections for consistency.
✅ Dark mode–optimized assets (because black logos on black backgrounds = disaster).
✅ Documentation for the client’s team, so they can build emails without coding.
Instead of designing every email from scratch, marketers simply assemble emails using pre-approved components. The result? Faster production, fewer errors, and higher consistency.
🔹 Better Client Communication:
Before development begins, I walk my clients through how dark mode affects brand colors, how email grids function, and what rendering challenges to expect.
🔹 Pre-Tested Code & Components:
Every element in the design system is QA-tested upfront, so by the time an email is built, the risk of errors is minimal.
🔹 Massive Time Savings:
Tracking my own work, I’ve seen production time drop from 3–6 months per project down to 6–12 weeks—simply by systemizing the process.
💡 The takeaway?
Investing in an email design system upfront pays off in efficiency, quality, and long-term scalability.
An effective email production workflow isn’t about cutting corners—it’s about setting up a solid foundation from the start.
Just like a chef preps ingredients before cooking, email teams should prepare their design and code libraries before jumping into production. This approach not only makes life easier for marketers, designers, and developers—it also ensures every email meets the highest standards.
So let’s ditch the Frankenstein emails. Let’s embrace mise en place for email.
💬 What’s your biggest email production challenge? Let’s chat!
📩 Connect with me on LinkedIn or send a message.
