Case study · Lifecycle email
Every Fountainful order is a handmade fountain that takes anywhere from a week to over two months to build. I audited the email program against that wait, retimed the customer journey across five product lines using real production data, and redesigned the newsletter.
The brief
Fountainful is a family-run design studio selling handmade fountains from artisan workshops like Massarelli, Campania, Fiore Stone and Giannini, plus engineered fire and water pieces from The Outdoor Plus. Customers pay in full, then wait while their piece is cast, finished and shipped on a freight pallet.
The email program already worked hard, and its wait-period emails were some of the most opened in the account. But it had been built piece by piece over years, and nobody had checked it against how long the pieces actually take.
So the job was to find where the program goes quiet or says the wrong thing at the wrong time, and fix it in small steps the client's team could build, without touching what already worked.
What the audits found
Phase 1
The wait series for the first brand I audited ended more than a week before most pieces shipped, so buyers who had already paid could go weeks without hearing anything.
The longer the build, the longer the silence.
Phase 1
Two emails the day after shipping, then nothing until day 24. That's the stretch when the customer is setting the piece up and showing it off.
Days 2 to 23: the most engaged window, and empty.
Phase 1
Finishes are proprietary to each workshop, so repeat customers come back to the same artisan for smaller pieces that match. Nothing in the program pointed them there.
Bird baths and planters in the same finish, from the same workshop.
Phase 1
The owner says workshop, not factory, and artisan team, not manufacturer. The emails didn't, and the heritage that justifies the price wasn't mentioned.
Massarelli at 54 years, Fiore at 77, used nowhere.
Phase 2
Tracing every automation turned up setup issues a dashboard never shows: gaps in which flows each brand was part of, a filter that wasn't filtering, and wait series that kept running after an order shipped.
Small settings, real gaps in what buyers heard.
Phase 2
Opening every automation and tracing every wait series node by node caught two timing figures in my own earlier notes that were wrong. One was on the only brand already timed correctly, which I would otherwise have told them to change.
The standard since: no timing figure without the delay node behind it.
Before and after
The Phase 1 audit mapped every email a Massarelli buyer gets, with the gaps marked. By Phase 2 the client's team had built the fixes, and the map covered all four concrete brands. Select either map to see it full size.
Series ends day 16 Day 21 email addedLive on Massarelli
22 days of silence Day 10 check-inLive on four brands
Two emails on day 1 Spaced to days 1 and 2Live, plus a refund exit on care emails
The data
For Phase 2 I measured a year of orders, comparing each order date with its ship date. Accessories like pumps and samples ship in days, so I separated them out first. What was left showed every brand but one ending its wait emails too early.
Days from payment. Each brand's wait emails were retimed against how long its main pieces actually took to build, with accessories left out. Campania was already right and stays as built. The client's team is rolling the changes out in their own order.
Outdoor Plus
The Outdoor Plus line, gas fire pits, steel rain curtains and fire-and-water bowls, carries some of the biggest tickets in the catalog. It had a wait series and nothing after shipping: no check-in and no care content at all, for a gas appliance that sits outside all winter.
It also needed a different voice. There's no artisan family behind an engineered steel fire feature, and heritage language would ring false to someone spending thousands on one. The copy direction leans on precision instead: exact, confident and generous with detail.
And one firm rule. No email instructs anyone on gas. The care emails name what tends to come up in a first season and hand off to the manufacturer's technical team.
Professional installation is recommended and good trades book up. Nothing told buyers that.
It was landing while most buyers still had weeks to go.
Added as a fifth brand once the four concrete-brand flows become one.
A new flow that splits on product tags already in the account: fire, water, or both.
The work
Every phase ended in documents the client's team could build from at the screen, with a single starting step for each recommendation.
Under the hood
Omnisend can't see when a freight pallet arrives, and freight transit can vary by more than a week depending on where the buyer lives. So the check-in sends 10 days after shipping and is written to read right either way.
The wait series only stopped on cancellation, so a buyer could get a production update after their piece had already shipped. Exiting on fulfillment means a later email can only reach someone still waiting.
Pumps, stoppers and color samples are their own order lines and ship in about three days. Left in, they dragged every average down and made the wait look shorter than it is.
The day 10 check-in ran as four near-identical flows, so every edit happened four times. One flow with a split by workshop also knows which artisan the buyer chose, which is what the matching-piece cross-sell needs.
Newsletter images pull straight from Shopify with a size instruction on the URL, so every piece comes back framed the same way without anyone cropping.
Some mail apps recolor light emails in dark mode. Setting a background on every section means the whole email flips together instead of turning into a patchwork.
It started as an audit of a single brand. Each phase has grown from the last, and the client's team has built most of what was recommended. Customers now reply to the post-shipping check-in with photos of their pieces in place.