A short note on what we're sending Thursday — and the philosophy behind every email that follows it.
Every email is a product, a price, a banner, a button. The logic is rational — if we're paying for the email, we should ask for the sale. But the math of the inbox doesn't work that way anymore, and hasn't for a while.
The average person receives north of 120 emails a day. They open a fraction. They read a smaller fraction still. The ones they read are almost never the ones shouting SHOP NOW — those get pattern-matched as commercial in under a second and swiped away without conscious thought.
What gets read is what doesn't look like marketing: a sentence that sounds like a person, a subject line that sounds like a question a friend would ask, a story that has a beginning instead of an offer.
This is the problem we're solving for in the first week.
When someone sees an unfamiliar sender land in their inbox, they make a snap decision: is this a person or is this a brand?
If it reads as a brand, the second, third, and fourth emails get progressively less attention until eventually we're in the promotions tab, then deleted on sight, then unsubscribed. We've lost them before we ever showed them a product.
If it reads as a person, the opposite happens. The next email gets opened faster. The one after that gets read in full. By email four or five, when we finally do show them something to buy, they're reading it the way you'd read a recommendation from a friend — with their guard down.
The first emails are an investment, not a transaction. We spend the first three or four sends earning the right to be read at all.
We're sending from a new domain. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail are watching every signal in the first two weeks to decide whether we're a real correspondent or a spammer pretending to be one.
The signals they care about are not opens or clicks — those are easy to fake. The signals that matter are replies, conversation depth, and time spent reading.
A commercial email generates almost none of those. A personal email — one that asks a real question, tells a real story, invites a real reply — generates all of them. Every reply we get in week one teaches the algorithms that we're a person worth delivering.
The frog email isn't just charming. It's a deliverability strategy disguised as a letter.
Everyone reading their email today has been sold to more times this week than their grandparents were in a year. The fatigue is real and it's permanent — no clever subject line, no urgency tactic, no discount stack reverses it.
The only thing that cuts through is the thing that doesn't sound like everyone else: a voice, a story, a small confession, a question that doesn't have a hidden agenda.
That's the entire wager. We're betting that in an inbox full of 25% OFF TODAY ONLY, an email about a ceramic frog will get read. And that the person who reads it will, three weeks later, when we finally do show them a new accessory, remember us as the people who told them about the frog — not the people who interrupted their morning with a coupon.
As it will appear in 400 inboxes.
A few months ago, a woman on Etsy sent us a photo of her pegboard with a tiny ceramic frog hanging from one of our hooks. No context. Just the frog.
We loved the frog. We wanted to write back and ask about the frog. Etsy lets you reply to messages but not really talk — it's like trying to have a conversation through a mail slot.
I said to Abby, "we need our own store so I can ask this woman about her frog." Abby said that was possibly the worst business case she'd ever heard. Then she agreed.
So here we are. I'm Alex, she's Abby, we're two parents in Pennsylvania who started making pegboard accessories out of our garage because the ones we wanted didn't exist. Over three thousand people have left us five-star reviews on Etsy. We still don't fully believe it.
We're not leaving Etsy — we just wanted somewhere we could actually write to people. You're one of the first people we get to write to from here. The store is at justhangingpegboards.com — if you're curious how a small problem turned into a small business, have a look around.
In the meantime, a small favor: hit reply and tell us the strangest thing hanging on a wall in your house. Even one word works.
— Alex & Abby
P.S. If you are the frog woman, please surface yourself.
Every line is doing a specific job. None of them are decorative.
The first sentence drops straight into a story. No greeting, no introduction. On mobile, the half-second a reader gives an unfamiliar sender is the difference between a read and a swipe. The frog earns that half-second.
"Abby said that was possibly the worst business case she'd ever heard." That single line makes the "we're a real family" claim believable in a way adjectives never could. Characters are more persuasive than descriptions.
"Over three thousand people have left us five-star reviews. We still don't fully believe it." The credibility is delivered in the same breath as a self-deprecation. Confident-but-disbelieving lands harder than confident-and-claiming.
"We just wanted somewhere we could actually write to people." The pivot off Etsy is told as a human desire, not a business move. People forgive ambition that comes from wanting to connect; they distrust ambition that comes from wanting to scale.
"The strangest thing hanging on a wall in your house." Specific questions outperform vague ones five to one. Bonus: it quietly does product education — readers think about their walls without us ever saying "think about your walls."
"If you are the frog woman, please surface yourself." A P.S. that implies this isn't a broadcast — it's a real letter with a real hope attached. P.S. lines are the most-read part of any email. This one rewards the reader who got there.
Build the world before you build the offer. Ask a real question more often than you ask for a sale. Show one thing, not twelve. Let the reader feel like they're reading a letter, not a landing page.
The product emails will come. The discounts, when they come, will land harder because of how we open.
Even when they start getting more commercial. The story comes first. The product follows. The discount, when it appears, is a reward for a relationship — not a substitute for one.