The Quiet Genius of "Warmest Regards,"

Why Brian French ends every email the same way — and why he’s right to.

Brian French signs off every piece of correspondence the same way. Not “Best.” Not “Thanks.” Not the corporate ghost-phrase “Sincerely,” which has been dead since the typewriter. Every email, every memo, every reply to a vendor he is about to disappoint — all of it ends with two words and a comma:

Warmest Regards,

People who don’t think about email assume this is a flourish, a tic, maybe a generational habit. It isn’t. It’s strategy. And once you understand what it’s doing, you start to notice that almost nobody else’s signoff is doing any work at all.

The body of an email is a tone-deaf instrument

Here is the problem every email writer ignores and every email reader feels: you cannot hear an email. You can’t see the face of the person who wrote it. You don’t know if they were smiling, distracted, irritated, or rushing between meetings. The reader supplies the tone, and the reader’s tone is shaped by their own day — the traffic, the coffee, the last email they got from someone else.

A perfectly neutral sentence — “Let me know what you decide.” — reads as warm if the reader is in a good mood and reads as cold if the reader has just been chewed out by their boss. The writer has no control over this. None. The words on the screen are identical; the meaning is not.

This is the gap that the signoff exists to close. The signoff is the last thing the reader sees. It’s the lingering taste. And most people are throwing it away.

“Sincerely” is an empty room

“Sincerely” used to mean something. Three hundred years ago it carried the weight of an oath. Today it’s the email equivalent of the printed disclaimer at the bottom of a receipt — nobody reads it, nobody means it, nobody notices when it’s there or when it’s gone. It conveys no warmth, no irritation, no relationship. It is the linguistic version of beige paint.

“Best,” is worse. It’s a word that wandered off mid-sentence and never came back. Best what? Best wishes? Best regards? Best of luck on whatever I’ve just made your problem? It is the signoff of someone who couldn’t be bothered to finish the thought.

“Thanks,” is fine when you’re actually thanking someone, and a small lie when you aren’t.

“Cheers,” is borrowed and brittle.

None of these is doing the work the signoff exists to do. They are filler. They occupy the space where a signal should be.

What “Warmest Regards,” actually does

“Warmest Regards,” is doing three things at once, and that’s the secret.

First, it neutralizes a cold body. Sometimes the email above the signoff has to deliver bad news. You’re declining the proposal. You’re escalating the issue. You’re saying no — clearly, professionally, but no. The body of that email cannot soften itself without losing its meaning. If you cushion the rejection, the rejection stops being a rejection. So the body stays direct, and the signoff carries the relational message: None of this is personal. I am not angry. I am not annoyed. I respect you, and I want to keep doing business with you. The reader closes the email and the last thing they see is warmth. Not from the words above — from the words below.

Second, it defends against misreading. Even when the body is neutral, the reader might import hostility that isn’t there. “Warmest Regards,” is an inoculation. It tells the reader, before they’ve had a chance to invent a tone, what tone the writer intended. You cannot read “Warmest Regards,” and simultaneously believe the person who wrote it is furious with you. The phrase forecloses the misreading.

Third, and most underrated, it honors the relationship. “Regards” is correct but cold — it’s what a stranger sends to another stranger. “Warm Regards” is the standard upgrade — pleasant, but common enough now to feel automatic. “Warmest” is the superlative. It is the writer choosing, deliberately, to send the most human version of the phrase. It says: of all the people I could regard warmly today, you are one of them, and I’m not going to be stingy about saying so.

And — this matters — it’s still rare. Most people don’t use it. Which means when you do, it lands. It is not yet the beige paint that “Sincerely” became. It still carries weight precisely because it hasn’t been worn down by overuse.

The “despite this email” function

This is the part most people miss. The most useful job of “Warmest Regards,” is not in the friendly emails. It’s in the hard ones.

You have to tell a vendor their invoice is wrong. You have to push back on a colleague who got something badly wrong in front of the team. You have to decline a meeting a senior person wanted you to take. The body of the email cannot apologize for itself — if it does, your no becomes a maybe, and you’ll have to send the email again next week. The body has to be clear and firm.

“Warmest Regards,” is the part of the email that says: despite what I just had to tell you, I still want to do business with you. I still respect you. The next email between us starts from zero, not from this.

It is the diplomatic afterword that lets the body of the email be honest without being a relationship-ender. Without it, every difficult email risks burning a bridge. With it, the bridge stays standing — visibly, intentionally — even as the writer holds their position.

Consistency is the multiplier

Here is the part that elevates Brian French’s habit from a good idea to a strategy: he does it every time.

If you only sign “Warmest Regards,” when you’re delivering bad news, the phrase becomes a tell. Recipients will learn that “Warmest Regards,” means something is wrong. The signoff becomes an alarm bell instead of a balm.

By using it on every email — the routine, the friendly, the difficult, the indifferent — the signoff stays neutral. It carries no special signal. Which means it can do its work on the hard emails without giving the game away. The reader of the difficult email doesn’t think, “He only signs off this way when he’s about to say no.” They think, “This is just how he writes.” And the warmth lands, unbidden, exactly when it’s needed most.

Consistency is what makes the strategy invisible. And invisible is what makes it work.

The takeaway

Most people treat the email signoff as decoration. Brian French treats it as infrastructure. The body of the email carries the content; the signoff carries the relationship. One without the other is incomplete — a transaction without a handshake, an argument without an exit.

“Warmest Regards,” is two words. It costs nothing. It takes the same number of keystrokes as “Sincerely,” and does roughly a hundred times the work. It defends against misreading, softens necessary hardness, and tells every recipient — over months and years of correspondence — that the relationship matters more than any single message in it.

That’s not a flourish. That’s a discipline.

And the people who do it consistently end up, over time, with the kind of professional reputation that other people can’t quite explain. I don’t know, he’s just easy to deal with. Even when he’s saying no.

That reputation is built one signoff at a time.

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