We put Flodesk Studio, the new AI email design app, to the test with a real client offer. Here's the process, the result, and whether it actually sounds like you.

If you've been on the internet for more than five minutes this year, you've seen the promises. AI that writes your emails. AI that designs your emails. AI that basically runs your whole marketing department while you sip lemonade by a pool.

We're a little skeptical of all that. (You may have noticed.)

Not because we're anti-AI; we use it plenty, but because most AI design tools have the same problem: everything they make looks and sounds like it came out of the same machine. Technically fine, but completely forgettable. And if you've spent years building a brand people actually recognize, "technically fine" is a downgrade.

So when Flodesk launched Studio—their new email design app, currently free in beta—we didn't want to just read about it. We wanted to throw a real project at it and see what came back.

Here's exactly what happened.

First, what Studio actually is (and isn't)

Flodesk Studio is an email design app. You describe the email you want, Studio brings it to life on-brand, then you refine it in chat or pixel by pixel until it's exactly right.

Here's the part that made us pay attention: Studio isn't built on generic AI generation. Flodesk's design team hand-crafted thousands of individual components, including layouts, blocks, typography, and palettes. The AI's job is to assemble those human-designed pieces based on your prompt and your brand. It’s accelerated, not generated.

Or, as Flodesk puts it, the reason a Studio email looks like a real designer touched it is simple. One did.

That's a genuinely different approach from the "assistant" and "copilot" wave everyone else is riding. Studio isn't a helper doing your work for you. It's a place to work—a studio, in the actual sense of the word. You're still the one making things. You just get there a whole lot faster.

One more thing worth knowing up front: Studio is email-first for now. It's an AI email-design app today, with more on the way. And while it works best with Flodesk, you can export your design as HTML and use it with any email platform that supports it, such as Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Beehiiv, or whatever you're on. Design here, send anywhere.

Okay. Now the fun part.

The test: a real offer, and a real deadline

At Gradient, we work primarily with Realtors, and this summer, we're running a special offer for them. We needed an email to promote it—something that stood out from our usual newsletters but still looked and sounded unmistakably like us. Normally, this is an hour or two of work. Building the layout, wrestling blocks into place, second-guessing the header, rewriting the button copy four times. You know the drill.

Instead, we opened Studio.

The prompt

Studio gives you helpful starter prompts if you're staring at a blank screen, which is a thoughtful touch. But we came in with details: what the offer was, who it was for, and our tone of voice (warm, practical, zero hype—if you've read anything we've ever written, you know the vibe).

Because we're already Flodesk users, Studio knew our brand aesthetic without us lifting a finger. Colors, fonts, the whole look. That alone removed the most tedious part of starting any new design.

Then Studio brainstormed on the build before presenting anything, and then it came back with three finished directions. Some were more visually designed, and some were more text-based. It wasn’t three vague sketches or generic templates; it was three actual fully-built emails.

The reaction

We're going to be honest: we were stunned.

The first option nailed it. The colors, the fonts, the layout—it looked like our brand, not a template wearing our brand's clothes. And the blocks it chose were genuinely creative. It pulled in a testimonial block to build trust and a countdown timer for the offer deadline, which were two things we absolutely would have added ourselves, already styled and sitting exactly where they should be.

This is the question every one of these tools lives or dies on: does it actually look and sound like me?

This one did.

The finishing touches

From there, it was ours to shape. We made a few minimal tweaks to the style and the content, like refining font sizes in the canvas, adjusting a line here and there. Studio lets you edit the way your brain works: talk through changes in chat, or get in there and adjust things by hand. Drag, drop, move stickers around, fine-tune every pixel if that's your thing. You're in control the whole way through.

Then it was ready. Since we're on Flodesk, we clicked to send it straight through, and we could still make simple edits there if needed. But here's the feature we're most excited about as an agency: you can download the HTML and use it anywhere. For us, that's huge. We have clients on all kinds of email platforms, and now every one of them can benefit from design at this level, no platform switch required.

The verdict

An offer email that would have taken us an hour or two to build from scratch was done, and done well, in about 20 minutes. And not "done" in the settle-for-it way. Done in the "we were proud to hit send" way.

That's the real headline here. Studio isn't a shortcut that trades quality for speed. It's speed without the trade. What took hours now takes minutes, and the result still looks like a real brand made it, because underneath the AI, real designers did.

A few other things worth knowing: if you don't have a brand yet, Studio has pre-made brands you can start from. The block library is deep with headers, testimonials, countdowns, polls, quotes, and even recipe blocks, all styled to your brand from the start. And it's being built in public, with new features shipping constantly. It's free while it's in beta, and that’s something worth taking advantage of.

One Gradient tip before you go

Be detailed in your prompt. The more context you give Studio up front—your offer, your audience, your tone—the fewer edits you'll make on the back end. A vague prompt gets you a starting point. A detailed prompt gets you 80% of the way to a finished email. We learned this in one session, and it's the single biggest thing that separates a good Studio result from a great one.

The bottom line

We spend a lot of time telling our clients that consistency doesn't have to mean generic, and that you can show up regularly online without your brand getting watered down in the process. Studio is one of the few tools we've tested that actually supports that idea instead of fighting it.

The artist is still you. The tools are just a lot better now.

Start creating today at studio.flodesk.com. It's free in beta, so go make something that looks and sounds like you.

I Gave Flodesk Studio One Prompt and 20 Minutes. Here's What Happened.