Back-in-Stock Email for Fashion Brands

Fashion restock is not generic ecommerce restock. A shopper does not want "the dress." They want the dress in a 4 or a medium. That single fact changes the whole flow.

The trigger fires on the variant, not the product. When a shopper hits a sold-out PDP, picks a size, and joins the notify list, Klaviyo records the exact size SKU. The email sends only when that size restocks. Restock the XS and the medium-waiter hears nothing. This is why fashion BIS conversion runs so high: the buyer already raised their hand for a specific thing.

Send the moment inventory clears. Do not batch into a daily digest. A fashion restock can sell through again the same afternoon. A 2pm send beats a 9am digest because the stock disappears between sends. Treat the notify list as a priority queue. First to sign up, first to buy.

Hold the size. "We held your size M for 48 hours" is the mechanic that lifts conversion two to three times over a plain "back in stock" notice. The shopper pre-committed to a size when they joined the list. Removing that decision at send time is what closes the sale. Back-in-stock emails convert 20 to 40 percent of the notify list. A broadcast converts 1 to 3 percent. The gap is intent.

Lead with the image. Name the exact item, the exact size, and the price. Add one true scarcity line.

Real copy: - Subject: It's back. The Selene Slip Dress in your size. - Preheader: We held size M for you for the next 48 hours. - Headline: It's back. In your size. - Scarcity: Only 12 left in your size.

The CTA deep-links to the variant page with the size pre-selected. One click to checkout. Never the homepage. Never the collection.

Fashion emails lean hard on product photography, so the rendering has to hold up under it. The structure is built for the worst email clients first.

Nested HTML tables carry the layout. No divs, no flexbox, no grid. Gmail strips what it cannot parse, and tables survive every client that matters. Each row is a table element, each block a nested cell.

Every style is inline. Background color, padding, and font size all sit on the element in a style attribute. Gmail drops the head stylesheet, so anything not inlined disappears. Mailwright inlines at export.

The CTA is a bulletproof VML button. Outlook 2007 through 2019 render email in Word, which ignores CSS backgrounds on links. The button ships with VML markup (a v:rect and v:fill) so Outlook paints the solid fill and the shape. Without it, Outlook shows a blue underlined link on white.

The message layer is live text. The headline, price, and scarcity line are real text over a background, not burned into a JPEG. Text scales to the reader, loads before images download, and stays readable for screen readers. The product photo carries the emotion. The text carries the close.

Dark mode is declared, not guessed. The head carries a color-scheme meta set to light and dark. Apple Mail and Outlook invert backgrounds in dark mode. Declaring the scheme tells them how to handle the palette instead of letting them invert at random and turn your ivory dress photo into a muddy square.

One mobile media query handles the small screen. A single max-width:480px block bumps the headline size and stacks the padding. One query, not five. Stacked breakpoints fight each other in Samsung Mail.

Web fonts degrade on purpose. The brand face loads where supported, with a Helvetica and Arial stack as the floor. Outlook and Gmail strip web fonts entirely, so the fallback has to carry the design alone. It does.

Copy the exported HTML from Mailwright. From there the path is short.

In Klaviyo, open your back-in-stock flow email. Drag in an HTML block, or set the email type to source code. Paste the full HTML document. Save.

In Mailchimp, start a campaign and choose Code your own. Select Paste in code. Paste the HTML and click Validate. Mailchimp flags any tag it does not recognize.

Swap the brand. Replace "Maris & Wren" with the client name, drop in their logo image URL, and update the footer address. The logo swap is one image src.

Swap the colors. The palette lives in two places, the color-scheme meta and the inline styles. Find and replace the hex values so the button, accent, and footer stay consistent. Keep text contrast above 4.5:1 so dark-mode inversion stays legible.

Swap the links. Every href should point to the product page with the size pre-selected. For fashion, that means the variant URL, not the collection. The shopper asked for a size. Land them on it.

Wire the merge tags. Fashion BIS is size-specific, so the merge tags are too.

Klaviyo: - Product name: {{ item.name }} - Product URL (with size): {{ item.url }} - Price: {{ item.price }} - Held size: {{ person|lookup:'size_held' }} or the BIS event property {{ event.size }}

Mailchimp: - Product name: *|PRODUCT_NAME|* - Product URL: *|PRODUCT_URL|* - Price: *|PRODUCT_PRICE|* - Held size: *|SIZE_HELD|* (a list field or a conditional merge)

Test before you send. Send a preview to Gmail on web and Android, Apple Mail on iPhone and macOS, and Outlook on Windows. Flip dark mode on iPhone and macOS to confirm the color-scheme meta holds. Confirm the product image downloads, the VML button fills in Outlook, and the CTA lands on the right size variant.