Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m driving to the office at Threadbird. I’m not typing a single word. I’m talking into my phone, and AI is turning everything I say into text. Later I’ll clean it up with AI too, because why not.
That’s not a gimmick. That’s the whole point of this post.
It’s been a few months since I last wrote one of these, and I want to be honest about why. I had to step back for a while. The world is changing right now, and not just in the apparel space. The whole thing is shifting. If I didn’t stop, get my head straight, and refocus, we were going to get left behind. So I went quiet and I went to work.
Everyone is talking about AI. AI, AI, AI. And don’t get me wrong, it’s incredible. But most people are using it for the wrong thing. They’re asking, “How do I get ChatGPT to write my blog post for me?” That’s not what I’ve been doing.
What I’ve been doing is learning how to actually use these tools to build things. The real things. The stuff that runs your business.
The biggest lesson of the last few months
You have to learn how to use AI the right way, or you’re going to fall behind. That’s it. That’s the lesson.
I’ve spent the last few months learning and mastering Claude Code, looking at how to use this technology to better myself, better Threadbird, and better Palmr. I even used it last night to redo this website. When I first threw the site together, I picked a generic theme, made a few tweaks, and moved on with my life. Last night I just told it, “Make this awesome,” and it did.
That’s the whole thing. If you’re not learning how to use AI to take your business to the next level, you’re going to get left behind, because the tools are changing every single day.
Let me give you some real examples.
The Palmr store I spent a month building, rebuilt in one evening
Two years ago I built the first version of Palmr’s Shopify store. I bought a $400 theme and built it out from there. I probably spent at least a month on it, and I can’t even tell you how many hours I poured into that thing on top of what I paid for the theme. And honestly, it still looked dated. It wasn’t at the level I wanted.
Recently I sat down with Claude Code and had it design me a brand new store, fully customized, exactly how I wanted it. It did an incredible job. Not only did it look way better than what I built two years ago, the whole thing was done in one evening. What took me a hundred hours the first time, I did in a few.
And here’s the part that really got me. I was paying $150 or more every month on different Shopify apps just to get the features and customizations I wanted. Half of them didn’t even work the way I needed, or they were buggy. So I deleted all of them and built my own versions instead. Fully custom. Exactly how I want it. No monthly app fees.
That’s the real power of these tools. It’s not writing your captions. It’s building the thing other people are renting.
How PalmrOS turned into something bigger
Then I looked at my own tech stack, all the tools I was using to keep Palmr organized, and I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t organized enough.
I had Notion holding a dozen different jobs at once. Knowledge, team management, assigning tasks to designers, product development. My tech packs and designs were sitting in a Dropbox folder. There were spreadsheets everywhere, and half the time I couldn’t even remember which spreadsheet I’d put something in.
On top of that I’ve got social media, my media gallery, videos, content, all of it to keep track of. It was a mess.
So I said, fine, I’m just going to build my own software to run all of this myself. I started on what I was calling PalmrOS. I got about a month in and sat back and thought, man, this is incredible. My team loves it. My life is so much easier.
And that’s when it hit me. Why don’t I build this for other people too?
I’m not doing this to get rich off it. If it makes a little money, great. But that’s not the goal. I love this industry and I want to help the people in it. So I decided to turn it into a real product. It’s called OBI-Hub.
We’re in beta right now, and so far I love what I’ve built. The early feedback has been great. It’s made my own life so much easier that I want to put it in the hands of any clothing brand, no matter the size.
Because it’s in beta, it’s free right now. When we launch, the pricing is going to stay friendly. We’ll have a plan as cheap as free. The most expensive plan, which almost nobody is going to need, will probably land around $79 a month, and it gets cheaper if you pay annually. Most people will be on the $19 or $49 plan, and the value you get out of it is massive. I’m building it this way on purpose, because I want brands to actually thrive.
This isn’t new for me. I started in software.
And this isn’t just about OBI-Hub. I’m looking at every project and every business I have and asking the same question: how do I push this further with these tools?
The truth is, software is already in my DNA. Before any of this, I started out building Storenvy. I was on the planning side, not the coding side. I wasn’t a developer. But I dabbled in some HTML in the early days, and I’ve always been around how this stuff gets made.
Over ten years ago, we built our own software for Threadbird. It’s the behind-the-scenes tool my staff uses to write orders and manage our customers. At the time it was incredible. But it was built on a very old operating system that isn’t really supported anymore. No API access. A lot of it just wasn’t tunable.
We tried to find something to switch to. And it was honestly shocking how poorly designed everything out there was. Almost every demo we sat through would have been a massive step backward compared to the software we built over a decade ago. So I asked the same question I keep coming back to: in this day and age, why not just build it ourselves?
The million dollar number
That’s exactly what we’ve been doing behind the scenes, and we’re hoping to be done in the next 30 to 60 days. We’re rolling the new version out to all of our clients at Threadbird. What we’ve built so far is incredible, and it’s going to change the game for us as a company.
Here’s the part that’s almost hard to believe. Over the last ten-plus years, between building, updating, and maintaining our software, we’ve probably spent at least a million dollars on it.
Now we’re building a brand new version. Completely upgraded. Every single feature we’ve ever wanted. Fully connected to all of our vendors. Automations running everywhere, replacing apps we were paying thousands of dollars a year for.
And we’re building all of it ourselves. The only thing we’re really paying for is AI tokens.
Sit with that for a second. A million dollars of software, rebuilt better, for the cost of tokens.
Why I wanted to share this
This post is different from what I normally do. I’m usually in here teaching screen printing, fulfillment, brand building, the tactical stuff. I’ll be back to that soon, and I’m looking forward to building out new content.
But this one I just wanted to share, because it’s the biggest shift I’ve seen in a long time. The tools are here. They’re cheap. And they’re getting better by the day.
If you’re not keeping up, you’re going to get left behind.
So don’t get left behind. Start learning. Start building.
