Italian Artisan is a Milan-based company that connects international fashion brands and corporations with premium Italian manufacturers. Founded by Lorenzo Colucci.
Lorenzo Colucci did not build Italian Artisan's outbound engine by accident.
He built it by obsessing over what actually works.
Two years of testing tools, refining sequences, and studying what makes decision-makers respond had led him to a simple conclusion: cold email, done with precision and the right infrastructure, is the most effective way to reach the clients that matter most to his business. And for the infrastructure, he landed on Smartlead.
This is how Italian Artisan runs its outbound operation and what it has made possible.
Italian Artisan serves two distinct client types.
The first is international fashion brands that want to produce their collections in Italy, accessing the craftsmanship and manufacturing infrastructure that the Italian fashion industry is known for.
The second is international companies, across industries like luxury hospitality, automotive, tourism, and events, that want to create premium merchandise for VIP clients, brand experiences, and business propositions. Think Four Seasons commissioning bespoke branded items. Think Pagani working with a manufacturer who understands what luxury means at that level.
The challenge with the second client type is that this kind of work is rarely anyone's core job.
There is no dedicated merchandise procurement manager sitting at a luxury hotel group waiting to receive a pitch.
The need exists, but the person responsible for it might be a marketing director, a personal assistant, or a department head who thinks about it occasionally rather than daily.
That is exactly why cold email works so well for Italian Artisan.
"Doing advertising through Facebook and Instagram or Google is not so effective because it is very expensive to get qualified leads," Lorenzo explains. "What we do is identify the niche markets we want to address and then find the decision maker."
Cold email gave Italian Artisan the ability to reach those decision-makers directly, at the right level of seniority, with messaging tailored to their specific context. And it gave Lorenzo the data to see in real time what was working and what needed to change.
Italian Artisan's target contacts are not sitting in a single database waiting to be found.
A luxury hotel group's marketing director in Singapore, a car brand's events manager in Munich, a high-end travel company's VIP services lead in New York: these contacts are spread across dozens of industries and geographies, and they require careful identification before any outreach begins.
Lorenzo's team uses Smartlead's prospecting tools to filter by industry, seniority level, and company type, building targeted lists that exclude entry-level contacts entirely. Every campaign starts with a precise audience before a single email goes out.
Before switching to Smartlead, Italian Artisan was running its outbound stack across three separate platforms. Apollo for lead finding. Warm Up Inbox for deliverability management. Instantly for campaign execution.
Each tool added a layer of complexity. If something broke, isolating the problem meant diagnosing across three systems. Managing campaigns meant switching between three dashboards. And as the operation grew, the fragmentation became a genuine operational cost.
"At the beginning we had Apollo for finding the clients, a warm-up inbox to warm up the email, Instantly to send the email," Lorenzo says. "Now with just one tool we have everything connected and this is for me the best thing."
Deliverability is not a one-time setup. It requires ongoing attention, and it can degrade without obvious warning signs. For Italian Artisan, whose outreach targets senior decision-makers at premium brands, landing in the spam folder is not just a waste of a send. It is a missed opportunity that is difficult to recover.
Managing deliverability reliably, across multiple sending accounts and different campaign types, required infrastructure that could handle the complexity without constant manual intervention.
For Lorenzo, the warm-up infrastructure was one of Smartlead's most meaningful advantages. Every sending account needs to build a healthy reputation before campaigns go live, and managing that process across multiple domains had previously meant a dedicated tool and a separate point of failure. Smartlead's email warm-up guide explains the full mechanics of how peer-to-peer warmup networks build reputation more durably than simulated alternatives.
Inside Smartlead, warm-up is part of the same dashboard as everything else. Accounts get warmed up automatically. The health of each inbox is visible in one place. And when Lorenzo had a warm-up issue with two of his accounts early on, the support team resolved it within 24 hours.
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"Your warm-up is effective. In one dashboard you can control many things together," he says.
One of the features Lorenzo highlights most is a level of campaign control that other platforms simply do not offer at the same level of flexibility.
The ability to set the ratio between new contacts and follow-ups in a single campaign is one example. Italian Artisan runs their campaigns at 80% new contacts and 20% follow-ups, a balance Lorenzo arrived at through testing and found to be optimal for their outreach style. That is a configuration option Smartlead makes simple and visible. For context on how follow-up strategy affects reply rates, Smartlead's cold email follow-up guide covers the data behind timing, sequencing, and what separates effective follow-ups from ones that get ignored.
The ability to target only Google Workspace accounts, or to filter by sending conditions at a technical level, gives the team levers to protect deliverability in ways that general-purpose tools do not provide.
"The settings for me are so good because you can choose how important the follow-ups are versus the first contact, and also technical things like sending just to the Gmail accounts to increase deliverability," Lorenzo explains.
For Italian Artisan, the Master Inbox is the feature Lorenzo names first when asked what he values most in Smartlead.
Managing replies across multiple sending accounts without a centralized view means replies get missed, response times slow down, and the team spends time logging in and out of different inboxes rather than acting on leads. The Master Inbox eliminates that entirely. Every reply from every account appears in one place, with filters that make prioritization straightforward.
"The main one is the Master Inbox. Master Inbox is a top thing for me."
Lorenzo has a direct comparison point here. Italian Artisan used Apollo for an extended period and still uses it occasionally for lead finding. The limitation he kept running into was stability under load.
"Using Apollo sometimes could be a nightmare because if you need to work for an extended time it crashes. You can keep open just the window with Apollo because if you keep open 10 different windows you cannot use it. This situation never happened with Smartlead."
At the operational level this matters more than any feature comparison. A platform that does not crash when you need it most is a platform you can rely on when campaigns are running at volume.
Italian Artisan's cold email playbook is deliberately simple and consistently effective. Lorenzo developed it through testing and conviction about what respects a senior decision-maker's time.
The first email is short: three paragraphs at most, focused on getting attention and ending with a single low-friction call to action. For Italian Artisan, that call to action is always the same: do you want to receive our catalog? Not a meeting request. Not a demo ask. Just a catalog.
This approach maps closely to what Smartlead's research on interest-based CTAs shows consistently: asking for a small, low-commitment action generates significantly higher response rates than asking for a meeting in the first email.
"The call to action I think is extremely important. I never ask for a meeting because the most important things in business are money and time. So if you ask for money or if you ask for time, it is critical."
The second email is two sentences. It asks if the prospect had the opportunity to read the first message.
The third and final email is the one Lorenzo is most proud of. It acknowledges that the person contacted may not be the right person within the company, and asks if they can direct him to whoever handles this type of work.
"If the person is not the right person, you have the possibility to get in contact with the right one. But if the person is the right one, this person is proud of their work. They will definitely reply saying, yes, I'm the right person. And then you have the opportunity to open a conversation."
Three emails. Maximum two follow-ups. No more. The result on their best campaigns has been reply rates above 50% open rate, with an exceptional volume of replies from companies including Four Seasons and Pagani.
1. Master Inbox. The single most valued feature. Every reply from every campaign account surfaces in one centralized view with filters that make prioritization fast.
2. Campaign settings and ratio control. The ability to set precise ratios between new contacts and follow-ups, and to filter sends by technical parameters like sending to Google Workspace accounts only, gives Italian Artisan control over deliverability that other platforms do not offer.
3. Warm-up infrastructure. Reliable, managed within the same dashboard as campaigns, and effective. No separate tool required.
4. SmartProspect. Used to build targeted lists filtered by seniority, industry, and company type, excluding entry-level contacts from the start.
5. Platform stability. A consistent, reliable platform that does not degrade under multiple open windows or extended use, which had been a recurring friction point with prior tools.
Italian Artisan is continuing to develop its outbound operation.
Lorenzo is actively watching Smartlead's roadmap, particularly around agentic AI features and potential LinkedIn integration. He is already using SmartAgents and sees the direction the platform is heading as aligned with where his operation needs to go.
He is already using a separate LinkedIn outreach tool, and the one thing he says he would genuinely pay more for is the ability to run LinkedIn campaigns directly inside Smartlead, removing another point of fragmentation from the stack.
"I will cancel the other tool and I would love to pay you more to get this feature within Smartlead."
For now, the cold email operation is the engine. And it works.
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Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
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I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
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We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
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You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
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Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
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Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
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Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
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Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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