Steph Sellers started Cookies & Dreams in 2020, and it has grown from the Quad Cities into stores across Iowa and Illinois, a nationwide shipping business, and custom flavors for events like the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. Email is how fans hear about each month’s new cookies, and it all runs through Klaviyo.

Running stores and a bakery leaves little time for email design. Every email meant building it by hand in Klaviyo’s editor, making the photos, colors and copy feel like the shop, on top of everything else.

Brew pulled the Cookies & Dreams brand from idreamaboutcookies.com, so every email starts with the shop’s look, fonts and colors. Steph keeps Klaviyo for sending, with the list and flows she already has, and designs each email in Brew.

Now she describes the email and Brew builds it. October’s Cookies of the Month email started from a single caption, with Pumpkin Spice, Nae Nae’s Banana Bread and the Stead Sweet Drizzle cookie dreamed up by the Ambassador Kids at University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, then Steph swapped in her own photos and sent it through Klaviyo.

An email that used to be a design project now starts with one sentence. Steph tells Brew what she wants to send, and it comes back on-brand and ready to go.

In her words, it is like having another person on the team, one who learns the brand and the business even faster than an actual assistant would.