Email marketing tool Flodesk launched their much anticipated Studio product to the general public today. Studio is an AI-powered email design tool that you can prompt to create layouts for you. Then, you can export as HTML and upload into their main platform or any other email platform that accepts HTML designs.
You don't have to be a Flodesk customer to use Studio so I set up an account to try it. I began with three separate prompts in three separate chats:
- "I want to make a newsletter template for my flower design studio"
- "Make me an email design like the circus for a baby shower:
- "I want to make a welcome email series"
Now granted, I have not uploaded anything about my brand or design aesthetic into Flodesk and I gave it very little info to get started, but it kicked back basically the same design over and over and it's a pretty lackluster starting point.
I've never been impressed with Flodesk's design, which is its primary selling point, but Flodesk customers seem over the moon happy with this new app. Why is that?
My prompts in Flodesk Studio
Copywriter Kalyl Kadri said "As a copywriter / messaging strategist, the fact that they make the design process easy for me is perfect." Kalyl posted that it took 11 minutes to design an email for his current promotion and since he has good taste and a pretty specific design aesthetic, that is meaningful praise to me.
Kalyl and other Flodesk users on Threads also said they like that Flodesk Studio is "human made," meaning that the designs are not generated by AI. They come from a set of designs the Flodesk team created.
But Flodesk doesn't say that explicitly in their marketing materials. In fact, they're very vague about it on their landing page so I asked where that info was coming from and I heard from Kim Lech, who got early access to Studio. Kim's a brand strategist who identifies as an AI skeptic. They said, "[Flodesk's] designers worked on creating thousands of individual components which can then be put into all of these different combinations, and it's the composition of the human-made design layouts + assets that are organised with the help of their AI. From what I understand, the emails aren't generative. The builder has a finite amount of assets that the AI uses to compose emails."
Flodesk co-founder and CEO Rebecca Shostak commented on my post to further clear this up, saying, "First, the design foundation, which truly is 'human-made.' Every layout, block, and piece of the visual system was designed in-house by our team over the past year. Second, the AI: Studio uses Claude by Anthropic to accelerate the creative process and help generate copy as a starting point."
So, my current understanding is that Flodesk Studio does not generate design. It chooses from a set of designs pre-created by their team. But it will generate AI copy. I'm not sure what Rebecca means by "accelerate the creative process" but the continued vague language they're using is a little suss.
I do appreciate that Studio exports as HTML. Flodesk's history with locking messaging into images—a big reason accessibility and deliverability experts steer clients away from the tool—are something to watch out for in your HTML exports. Someone asked me how this works on mobile and Studio will not show you a mobile view of your email (a bad sign for inbox compatibility!) but it says "All Flodesk Studio templates are designed to be mobile-responsive." In other words, trust me bro! You'll have to test it when you import your template into your email publishing tool.
As a professional email writer and former in-house app designer, I'm underwhelmed, but as designer Carolina Poll pointed out, this isn't really for us. The Flodesk users who are excited about it like that it's helping them design their emails faster (they're currently competing for fastest record on Threads) and they like that the AI has guardrails to choose only from the set of designs Flodesk's team made.
One last thing to pay attention to here. In their announcement, Flodesk said "we're not stopping at emails" so maybe I was right after all that they're gonna get into websites, using Studio as the basis.
You can try Flodesk Studio now for free, whether or not you use Flodesk. Go to studio.flodesk.com to create an account.
