Jul 28, 2025
Emails Shouldn’t Take Hours: Why Teams Are Done Rebuilding and Ready to Just Export
Email design has come a long way. Brands obsess over visuals, layout, typography, motion, and storytelling.
Sophie Taylor
Lead Designer at Uploft
Let’s be honest, most email production still feels repetitive and frustrating. Teams spend hours rebuilding layouts, fixing tiny mistakes, and dealing with glitchy HTML that breaks in different inboxes. Everyone ends up doing the same work twice, even though the design was already approved. The issue isn’t that people don’t care, it’s that the tools make things harder than they need to be. Nothing about that process feels creative or efficient. Here’s why it keeps happening and what teams can do to change it.
Fixing workflows, not just symptoms
It’s easy to keep doing things the way you’ve always done them. Teams rebuild email layouts inside editors, patch together templates, and accept that exporting designs will always be messy and tedious. It keeps work moving, but it never solves the underlying problem.
Start by looking at what actually happens. Who is doing the work, what slows them down, and what keeps breaking? Your tools should support the way your team creates, not force everyone to adapt to outdated systems.
Tools that get in the way of clarity
Features like drag and drop or easy editing sound great on paper. They don’t matter much if the final email looks worse than the original design. Teams aren’t rebuilding layouts because they enjoy it. They do it because their tools can’t handle the work they already did.
Good tools help you ship work that looks intentional. Great tools make it simple to go from approved design to finished email without hacks, frustration, or compromise.
Email production is not rebuilding HTML
Your emails shouldn’t be defined by how well you can recreate them inside a rigid editor. They should reflect what you designed in the first place. Yet most teams waste hours slicing assets, recreating layouts, and fixing code that breaks differently in every inbox.
Your design already exists. The job is to make it clickable and ready to send, not rebuild it from scratch every time.
So how do you work smarter
Use a workflow that respects the work you already did. Keep the design. Map your links. Export cleanly. Let people focus on the part that actually matters.
Create systems that scale with your team instead of slowing everyone down. Put care into the final result, the email that your audience actually sees.
Efficiency isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about removing the tasks that never should have existed in the first place.
Have a point of view. Be willing to say something real.
Use design to support, not distract.
Build systems that can grow with you.
Show personality where it matters — especially in moments most people ignore.
