elegance in every transaction

the most impactful & tailored cold outreach

problem

Design at Adyen doesn't only serve marketing. It serves wherever it can move the needle. Sales had a specific problem: how do you get the attention of the world's most discerning brands — Prada, Dior, Christian Louboutin, Belmond, Oetker, Hilton — when their inboxes are already overflowing with payment provider pitches? A standard email campaign wouldn't cut through. A discount wouldn't make sense. And in luxury, the how of an approach matters as much as the what.

solution

We made something they couldn't ignore. A coffee table book — Elegance in Every Transaction — bundling our strongest luxury customer stories into a single, beautifully produced object. Watches of Switzerland. Farfetch. Oriflame. Daniel Wellington. Bijenkorf. Each spread paired editorial photography with a real client quote, presented with the kind of craft you'd expect from a magazine, not a B2B sales tool. The book was square, cloth-bound, dark green linen with foil-stamped typography. Every single copy was personalized — the prospect's brand name embossed inside, a personal note and handwritten signature from our CEO. Not a template. An actual signed object. 80+ books sent. The kind of response that doesn't happen with email,— actual reply emails from C-suite, mentions in meetings, screenshots shared internally at prospect companies. And four new enterprise clients closed off the back of it. For an outreach campaign at this level, that's an extraordinary conversion rate — but the real win is harder to measure. The book changed how prospects thought of Adyen before the first sales call. It said we understand your world without anyone having to say it.

The best work I've done at so far often starts with a question that isn't really about design: where can creative actually move the business needle? The marketing team is the obvious answer. But marketing's job is to attract. Sales' job is to close. And the gap between those two is often where the most interesting creative problems live, because it's where the brand promise has to become a brand experience.

Luxury is the perfect example. You can't sell payments to a luxury house the way you sell payments to anyone else. These are companies whose entire business is the art of restraint, materials, and craft. A PowerPoint pitch deck doesn't speak their language. A Calendly link feels cheap. So the question wasn't "how do we generate leads" — it was "what would actually make sense to give a Creative Director at Prada that they'd want to keep on their desk?"

The answer turned out to be the simplest one. Make something beautiful. Make it about them, not us. Personalize it in a way that proves a person was involved, not a mail merge. We used the same customer stories that already lived as case studies on our website, but we treated them like editorial — proper photography, breathing room, real typography, no buzzwords. The CEO signed every book by hand. The brand name inside was custom-set per copy.

What I'm most proud of isn't the four closed deals, although those paid for the production many times over. It's that the book made luxury brands feel like Adyen understood them, before we even had a conversation. That's what a good piece of brand work does. It does the selling for you, quietly, while you're not in the room.

year

2022