AI Stack Audit for a $2M D2C brand — what to skip and what to ship
Client: Direct-to-consumer apparel brand (anonymized)
Owner was being pitched four AI vendors quoting $1,800/mo combined. Audit ranked all of them against actual workflow impact, recommended skipping three, and flagged one in-house Claude workflow worth ~$28k/year in saved labor. Owner chose to run the in-house option themselves; came back six months later for an Implementation Plan on the next workflow.
- audit delivered
- 5 days
- vendor pitches recommended to skip
- 3 of 4
- in-house Claude workflow worth building
- 1
Challenge
Owner kept getting pitched. Every vendor sounded plausible, every demo went well, none of them mapped to her actual day-to-day. She wanted an outside read before signing anything.
Approach
Audit tier. 60-minute discovery call mapping every workflow that took her or her ops lead more than 30 minutes a week. Wrote up which workflows AI would meaningfully change, scored each vendor pitch against that list, recommended skip / try-it-yourself / hire-out per workflow.
Outcome
Owner skipped three vendor contracts (~$1,800/mo combined). Built the recommended in-house workflow herself. Came back 6 months later for a Plan tier on her next bottleneck.
Stack
- Discovery call
- Workflow map (delivered as PDF)
- Vendor scorecard
- Recommendations doc
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