About the founders

As with any good founding story, ours started when an idea, a passion, and immense drive all serendipitously came together in the form of a Oakland-based business - Codecrew.

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Alexander Melone
Andrei Marin
Alexandra Marin
I would not have gotten here without the pillars of this family... my team, my true friends, my brave sidekicks.

Alex, Andrei and Alex all saw a wide opening in the email marketing world for an agency that truly cares about its end product and each client it serves. After performing in-depth market analysis, they each were surprised to see that no other agency out there had effectively done this - all the others had been cranking out canned designs, templated strategy and analysis in order to maximize internal efficiency rather than providing the absolute highest-quality product to their clients - hence, CodeCrew stepped in to fill this underrepresented share of the market and take the world by storm. It turned out to be a good idea, because CodeCrew has been growing in leaps and bounds since day 1, and still retaining its original mission close to heart.

Passionate about making the world a better place through their complementary skill sets, they found that they could leverage Alex’s impressive design background with Andrei’s deep technical background and Alex’s client-facing experience to truly create a full-service offering clients can rely strongly upon. But business can only do so much good for the world, too - with each co-founder having a strong drive to use business for good, from day 1, CodeCrew has been working pro bono for various NGOs, planting trees all over the world, and so much more. In just the first 4 years of its existence, CodeCrew had already planted somewhere in the realm of 5000 trees globally.

Knowing that helping the Davids of the business world battle the Goliaths would be no small feat, this trio of email marketing experts pushed each other to improve upon their combined decades of experience in order to create the most beautiful and most strategically-sound marketing emails for their clients. Having spent the past 8+ years working directly with some of the largest and most influential companies of our time, along with some of the hottest startups of the era, the three founders have seen it all, done it all, and continue pushing to innovate in the email marketing sphere. As time progressed, they grew their agency into an inclusive, global organization that builds upon their experience along with the talents of the best email marketing minds in the world. As one of (if not the) first fully-remote, entirely global email marketing agencies in existence, CodeCrew spearheaded the international agency model in this realm of digital marketing.

After Alex tamed her co-founders (joking - they can’t be tamed. Trust us, we’ve tried), they set forth on the mission of making the world a better place through email marketing, all while also making sure that clients get to benefit from top-level service from a full-service email marketing agency that focuses on providing the highest quality work and best service rather than worrying solely about their own profits. Win-win-win!

What makes
this Crew special?

Well, for starters, the West Coast is the best coast, amIRite? CodeCrew isn’t out to just make a quick buck and templatize each client’s program, thinking that one size fits all and nobody is unique. Your email marketing program is an incredible chance to show the world just how awesome you are as a business, so why should you ever leave your email program, strategy, and build-outs with an agency that tells you the same strategy that 50 other clients of varying sizes and industries get too?

We don’t work that way - we have a heart, and know that each and every business has something amazing to offer the world, and needs an equally amazing Crew (pa-da-tss) to help them achieve their goals.

Having received countless customer emails whose sole message was to tell us how beautiful the email looked speaks volumes for the level of quality we hold ourselves to, and is one of the reasons we love what we do so much.

Here at CodeCrew, we design every email from scratch, never letting any two emails look the same, all while allowing your brand style to shine through like never before.

Although quality designs are our bread and butter, we know that no email marketing program can be considered complete nor successful without quality code or adaptive, data-driven strategy. Have you ever seen an email whose text was so small you couldn’t read it on your phone, regardless of if you were wearing your granny glasses or not? Have you ever had bad signal and only received a broken image with no info in your inbox from your favorite brand? Yeah, we have too, and we can’t help but wonder why those companies haven’t brought their email marketing program into the 21st century via mobile-responsive, mobile-optimized code. With roughly 8 out of 10 contacts reading emails on their phone instead of a desktop or laptop, it boggles us all the more. Fortunately for our clients, this is never a worry, and their customers can continue to look forward to each and every email that lands in their inbox.

The final part of this trifecta, solid email marketing strategy, is one of our favorite passions as an overall Crew. We’re blessed to work with companies in so many different industries who have such amazing products and services, and as a result, could never, even if we wanted to (which we don’t), templatize a single piece of their email marketing program’s strategy. Knowing well that our clients are unique, we tailor each and every email, automation, overlay, and sign up page specifically to them via data we gain through consistent A/B testing. We’re always learning, applying findings, and learning some more. This is how we’re able to consistently outperform our competitors and help our clients do the exact same with theirs.

...just how special?

We said it before and we’ll gladly say it again - we’re mission-driven to do good first and foremost, so from almost the very first month that we made a profit, we joined Patagonia and countless other brands to donate 1% of our revenue to sustainable causes through One Percent For the Planet.

We put our money where our mouth is, and since we talk a lot about our goal to make the world a better place, our money follows suit and helps support global environmental causes that help fight climate change, polluted waters, and so much more. We want to do well by our clients, but also want to do well by our local San Francisco Bay and global community in any way we can.

In addition to contributing to One Percent For the Planet, we have provided pro bono help to some of the most inspiring NGOs since day 1, such as Mission Graduates, a San Francisco-based non profit helping provide underserved communities’ children the ability to go to college and Impact Matters, a New York based non-profit aggregator and rating system to understand the true efficacy of your donations.

We’re continuing our NGO work through One Percent For the Planet now that we have a broader number of NGOs we can reach through their assistance, and plan to help at least a few a year, each year.

How do we always stay unique?

Simple - we take cues from our home, Oakland, and its diverse culture.

Home is where the heart is, and the bay area, specifically Oakland California, is where we call home. We’re fortunate to live in a forward-thinking, artsy, and wildly creative environment that is ever-changing, ever-evolving, and incredibly diverse in so many ways - culture, background, thought - you name it. As the birthplace of so many social movements, whether it be counterculture movement that swept the globe in the 1960’s, the Black Panther Party, the Hells Angels, even the Hyphy Movement, Oakland never stands still and is always at the forefront of cultural revolutions large and small, for better and for worse.

Oakland’s social movements have been around the world and back again, but even that is just a small part of what makes Oakland unique, and therefore, the perfect breeding ground for true, deep creativity. We’re hard-working people who never rest and the entrepreneurial spirit is in us deep to our core.

Did you know that the Mai Tai was invented in Oakland? The popsicle? Rocky Road ice cream? Heck, even Fantasy Football, “The Wave” that you see at sporting events around the globe and…. the squeegee? How about the fact that even Walt Disney himself drew direct inspiration for Disneyland from our very own Fairyland? Even some of the most inspirational and creative actors like Tom Hanks, Mark Hamill and Clint Eastwood hail from The Town.

We’re not just revolutionaries, or creative in a way that only Oaklanders can tout, but we have the smarts to back it up. Berkeley gets all the credit, but did you know that the UC system held its first classes in Oakland? The renowned writer Jack London also got his start - and his inspiration - in Oakland. Bruce Lee studied and later transformed the world of martial arts in his Oakland studio.

While we’re based in one of the most incredible, diverse, and inspirational places in the country if not the world, we’re even more fortunate to be based in one of the most forward-thinking metropolitan areas that the US has to offer. Ever heard of Apple? No? How about Google, or Facebook, Yahoo, Adobe, Salesforce? The list goes on and on, and so does the enthusiasm for driving the world forward at a blistering pace here. Although Silicon Valley is where the powerhouses congregate, they derive their inspiration from our big brother just across the bridge - San Francisco itself.

As one of the most progressive and forward-thinking cities in the country, we’re blessed to receive some of the brightest minds every day, seeking the opportunity to apply their talent, ideals, and chutzpah toward a more positive future for us all.

Over here across the bay, San Francisco’s hard-working, fast-paced culture leaks into our neighborhoods and combined with the artistic spirit that lives in Oakland’s unshakeable core, results in companies like CodeCrew. Mission-driven, pushing limits, and always trying to do well by others, it's not hard to see how our community inspires us to always be at the forefront of the email marketing world and continue to drive success for each and every one of our clients.