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Phantom Labs is a hands-on growth studio for ecommerce and local service businesses. We don’t just plan the marketing. We build it and run it. Right now that means a lot of email, plus the social, ad, web, and print work that orbits it. We’re looking for a designer we can hand a finished brief to and trust to bring it back better than we pictured.

This is an ongoing monthly retainer, starting immediately. It’s built to grow with us.

What you’ll be doing

Most of the work (around 80%) is image-based marketing emails. You’ll design campaign and flow emails for our ecommerce brands, primarily one in performance automotive and one in beauty. Every brief arrives complete with copy, goal, offer, and brand assets. Your job is layout, hierarchy, typography, and making it something worth the click.

• We expect to start around 20–35 emails per month, with volume likely growing toward 40–50 per month as the relationship expands.
• Briefs are generally delivered in monthly batches, with approximately 1–2 weeks minimum to complete each batch.
• Every email is fully image-based, so no HTML or coding.

The other 20% is miscellaneous work, including: social and ad graphics (mostly repurposed from the emails), the occasional one-off email for our service-based clients, and the occasional web asset or print project. Other one-off design needs that inevitably appear when you’re working with several growing brands.

We’d like to build a small bank of design hours into the monthly retainer (targeting 10 hours/month to start) specifically for this work rather than quote every little request separately.

What we’re looking for

First and foremost, you need to be very good at ecommerce email design.

Because these are image-based emails, typography, hierarchy, spacing, composition, and mobile readability matter a lot.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has a strong portfolio of real ecommerce marketing emails that have actually shipped
• Has excellent typography and visual hierarchy
• Can design across dramatically different brand aesthetics
• Can take a thorough brief and work independently from it
• Understands that marketing design has a job to do beyond looking pretty
• Keeps extremely organized Figma files
• Has experience creating social/ad graphics
• Has at least some web and/or print design work to show
• Can reliably overlap with U.S. business hours
• Has the capacity for Phantom Labs to be a meaningful, priority client rather than something squeezed into whatever time is left over
• Nice to have: Klaviyo experience, GIF or light motion work.

Years of experience matter considerably less to us than the quality of your work, reliability, and ability to understand a brand.

Non-negotiables

Our core digital work needs to be designed in Figma.

That includes emails, social graphics, paid ad creative, web assets, and the bulk of the recurring work you’ll be doing with us. Phantom Labs must have edit access to those working files.

This isn’t because we want to redesign your work behind you. It’s because if someone catches a typo five minutes before an email is scheduled, we need to be able to fix it rather than wait for a designer to come online.

For occasional print projects, we’re flexible. If Illustrator, InDesign, or another professional design tool makes more sense for the project, that’s completely fine. We just need the final working/source files to be organized and accessible to our team.

You’ll also need to:

• Deliver clean, Klaviyo-ready exports
• Work from briefs managed in ClickUp
• Communicate through Slack and/or email
• Keep files and components organized enough that someone besides you can understand them
• Hit agreed deadlines consistently

Our clients move quickly, and our timelines are real. If you regularly take on more work than you can reasonably deliver or deadlines tend to be aspirational, this probably isn’t the right fit.

On the flip side, we try very hard not to manufacture emergencies. Most email work is batched and assigned well in advance, briefs are complete, and you should have what you need to actually do the work.

How we’d like to structure the retainer

We’re looking for an ongoing relationship rather than paying project-by-project.

Our starting structure will likely look something like:

Monthly retainer

• Approximately 25 email designs
• Approximately 10 hours of additional design capacity for social, ads, web, print, and miscellaneous projects

Beyond the retainer

• Additional emails billed at an agreed per-email rate
• Additional miscellaneous work billed at an agreed hourly rate
• Anything expected to take more than 5 hours will be quoted as a fixed project before work begins
• Unused miscellaneous hours can roll over for one month

We’ll revisit the structure after the first 90 days once we have real-world data on volume, workload, and how we’re working together. If the relationship is going well and volume continues to grow, we’d rather resize the retainer appropriately than nickel-and-dime each other every month.

This is an independent contractor relationship, not a full-time employee position. You’re welcome to work with other clients. We simply need someone with enough ongoing capacity to reliably support ours.

How to apply

If you’re interested, please send us the following through the form below:

1. 3–5 of your strongest ecommerce marketing email samples
   Ideally finished campaigns, not just templates or concepts.
2. A few examples that show range
   Social/ad creative plus web and/or print work would be helpful.
3. Your proposed monthly retainer rate for:
   1. 25 marketing emails
   2. 10 hours of miscellaneous design work
4. Your overage rates for:
   1. Each additional email
   2. Each additional design hour
5. A little about your current availability
   Including your general working hours/time zone and whether you have capacity for an ongoing account of this size.

A portfolio link is perfect. Please make sure the email work is easy to find.

Applications without email samples won’t be reviewed.