How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers | Yana Welinder

Normally, I would hire a technical team like engineers. I didn't. Right? I sort of just came to codex and asked it to build the website. The idea is to use AI really anywhere in the process where that makes sense. Literally, my technical cofounder. There's so much you couldn't do before practically from a cost perspective, even from an execution perspective that is now totally possible. And so you can, like, unlock your creativity in a way that wasn't possible before. Really does unlock so much creativity. A lot of my designs start from a hand drawn sketch, but the other piece of this is I sort of developed the fashion prompt that's behind it. And it describes a lot of sort of what goes into garments. So it has, like, the the silhouettes, the proportion or the volume of of the dress, like, kind of like the fabric, how it flows, how it behaves, the construction details, how it moves, even how it sounds. The other piece that is still unsolved and I'm sort of still banging my head against the wall is to get it to create patterns based on my design. And there, I'm kind of running humans and AI in parallel. So I I am working with human pattern makers codex and just saying who's gonna get to making my thing fastest. Welcome to How I, AI. I'm Claire Vow, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have Jana Wallander, and she is building an AI native fashion startup. And she's gonna show us how AI can intersect art, creativity, and real world production and why computer use plus software means SaaS really isn't dead, at least not yet. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Merge. Building an AI product is one thing. The hard part is everything around it, connecting to the tools your team and customers rely on, letting agents take action with the right permissions, and keeping everything reliable and cost efficient once you're in production. Most teams end up piecing that together themselves. So instead of building the products you actually care about, you get pulled into integrations, permissions, routing, and all the infrastructure underneath. Merge is the infrastructure layer for production AI. It connects to thousands of tools, gives agents secure ways to act inside them, and optimizes model routing and spend without you building or owning any of it. OpenAI, Dropbox, and Ramp already use Merge to move fast and build AI right. Visit merge.dev/howiai to start building for free. Yana, thanks for joining How I AI. I'm an art and fashion girl. You know this. There are, like, five of us AI, art, and fashion girls on Twitter, and we all find each other. But I am one, and I love what you're working on. So immerse us in this new thing that you're working on, and then we'll talk …