Platinum Card Early Tenure Email Refresh
The Platinum Card carries a $750 annual fee. The email onboarding experience that greeted new cardholders didn't come close to justifying it. The existing curriculum was generic across card products, visually underdeveloped, and completely out of step with the card's increasingly younger membership base — 70% Millennial and Gen Z. The brief was a full overhaul: something Platinum-exclusive, benefit-forward, and built to actually land with that audience.
I developed the entire look and feel for the refreshed curriculum — from photography selects to building out all 12 emails with dynamic, modular layouts. The design had to do two things simultaneously: feel premium enough to match the Platinum brand, and feel personal enough to connect with members who respond to warmth and relevance over prestige signaling. I also strategically segmented the content across existing and net-new cardholders, so each audience received messaging calibrated to where they actually were in their relationship with the card.
The refreshed curriculum set a new internal benchmark for marketing emails at American Express — becoming the standard that other card products were measured against. For a brand operating at that scale, having your work become the reference point is its own kind of outcome.
