Perry Ellis International is one of America's most recognized apparel houses, with a portfolio of iconic brands and an email program that reaches millions of recipients a month. For a company built on decades of brand equity, “let AI run more of marketing” is not a casual experiment. Every send has to look, sound, and perform like Perry Ellis.

Perry Ellis x Backstroke: AI Email Template Builder

Faster or better, never both

The team faced the tension every mature email program hits. Producing on-brand campaigns—from briefing and design to copy, subject lines, and QA—is hard and time consuming. It eats hours per send. And the standard playbook of one hero image and one subject line for everyone leaves performance on the table. Personalization at scale without the use of AI is time & cost prohibitive. Yet, a single creative simply cannot be right for every subscriber.

Perry Ellis x Backstroke: Bulk Hero Variants

Like any smart marketing team, Perry Ellis wanted both levers at once: dramatically faster production and higher revenue per send. The bar was simple and unforgiving. Move faster and perform better without risking the brand.

AI on the creative, not just the audience

Perry Ellis adopted Backstroke as an AI-first layer across the email program, deploying several capabilities together. Generative campaigns built full, on-brand emails in minutes instead of hours, with Backstroke composing +180 on-brand variants from a handful of assets. Predictive Hero delivered subscriber-level creative, predicting the best hero image for each audience segment rather than sending one image to everyone. And subject line testing put Backstroke-generated subject lines head-to-head against the team's own.

Perry Ellis x Backstroke: Predictive Hero Test

Within the proof-of-concept window, 72% of campaigns (21 of the last 29 sends) were generated with Backstroke. This level of adoption speaks for itself!

Measurable from open to order

The numbers came in across speed, performance, and return:

• 17.5x return on Backstroke

• +45% revenue per recipient on the best predictive test

• +19.5% click-rate lift from predictive hero

• +96% conversion lift from AI-generated subject lines

• Open rates held on par with the team's own, with no deliverability hit

A sample of campaign-by-campaign results

Backstroke's predictive hero consistently beat the team's control creative:

• Casual shirts (3/25): +19.5% click-rate lift, +45% revenue per recipient

• Final Weekend (5/1): +12.5% click-rate lift

• Friends & Family (4/24): +11.5% click-rate lift

• Suiting (4/5): +9.8% click-rate lift

Against year-to-date benchmarks, Backstroke-generated campaigns outperformed on both full-price (+5.6%) and promo (+31%) sends.

Predictive subject lines matched human opens, lifted everything downstream (ie: the important stuff)

Across more than 420,000 test recipients, Backstroke subject lines held open rates on par with the team's own (42.95% versus 43.33%), with no open penalty and no deliverability hit, while lifting performance below the open: a 19% higher click-to-open rate, a 96% higher conversion rate, and roughly double the revenue per email.

Hours to minutes

Campaign production that once took a full manual cycle now happens in minutes, and predictive content is ready in roughly five.

A proven seven-figure opportunity with room to grow

Pulling it together, Perry Ellis saw a 17.5x return on Backstroke, with close to six figures in financial impact during the proof-of-concept period alone. Annualized, that is a seven-figure opportunity, and it sets the stage for eight-figure annual impact under a full Backstroke deployment across Perry's portfolio.

Perry Ellis x Backstroke: Hero Lab Creator

In their words

“At Perry Ellis, we've been impressed by Backstroke's ability to drive a 17.5x return while protecting the legacy of an iconic brand, and accelerating the creation and deployment of our email campaigns to minutes.”

Jay Nigrelli, President of DTC, Perry Ellis International 

“Transforming our marketing approach to AI-first with Backstroke has been a true partnership, and the performance results are impressive.”

Rachel Orlang, Site Manager, Perry Ellis 

“Success with the pilot led us to expand into four brands we support across Perry Ellis International. What started as a test has become our new way of working.”

Madison Black, Digital Marketing Manager, Perry Ellis 

From pilot to portfolio

What began as a proof of concept became Perry Ellis's new way of working, and is now expanding across four brands in the Perry Ellis International portfolio. The team got back the hours once spent producing campaigns, a repeatable way to lift performance with predictive, subscriber-level creative, and the confidence that all of it protects rather than dilutes the brand.

For a house built on iconic American style, this layer of predictive, AI-first creative helps ensure every message performs as well as it looks.