Momofuku — David Chang's culinary brand — runs a list of hundreds of thousands of subscribers across restaurant marketing, ecomm, and storefront communications. When bounces spiked and outbound started getting blocked, the stakes were obvious: a brand with that reputation can't afford email to quietly fail.

We ran a diagnostic on their sending infrastructure and found the root cause within the first working session: their WordPress sending path wasn't aligned with their SPF record, and DMARC was enforcing against the mismatch. Emails were authenticated at the envelope level but failing alignment checks downstream — the kind of issue most monitoring dashboards don't surface, since SPF reports as "passing" while delivery quietly degrades.

We rewrote the authentication config, brought WordPress into alignment, and walked their team through the changes so they'd recognize the pattern if it surfaced elsewhere in their stack. Sending was restored inside the engagement.