[Journey] Version Three: The Workflow I Built With Claude
By the time t-shirts were posted, version two of my workflow was proving slow for me. That is where version three started, and it is a different kind of upgrade from the ones before it.
I had run version two on mugs, then on t-shirts. Around the second quarter of 2026, AI had got good enough to build with, so I used it to build a better workflow.
Every version before this ran on online tools made for their own purposes. Version three runs on tools made for mine. If you run a print on demand store out of other people's apps, this is the part worth looking at, because you can build your own too.
I stopped using tools made for someone else's purpose and built my own, for mine.
It is the most efficient setup I have run.
Research: the same process, run by Claude
The research itself did not change. I still use the search bar on the marketplaces and look for proof that something sells, like the BSR on Amazon, or carts and sales in the past 24 hours on Etsy.
I just do not do it by hand anymore. I described my whole process to Claude, saved it as a skill, and now it runs on its own.
Design: the master is still mine, the bulk is not
The master design is still made by hand. You are selling to another person, and I still believe that needs a human touch. AI does not understand people, which makes this part harder to automate, so it is the one I keep. Why is written up here.
AI doesn't understand people. So the master design is the one job I kept.
The bulk part moved. In version two, Illustrator with a script took one master and swapped the variable across the whole niche list. Now a bulk designer Claude built for exactly this job does the same thing, a variable swapper, and it cut the time a lot. Around 10,000 designs come out in minutes.
Mockups moved the same way. Photoshop with a script made them in version two. Now a bulk mockup generator, also built with Claude, makes tens of thousands of them in minutes.
The SEO gets written in the same preparation step, next to the designs. Since the t-shirt test, that means handwritten titles with just a few variables swapped, and pre-written keywords, instead of bot-generated ones.
Upload: the spreadsheet stays, the Printify push got a tool
Uploading works the same way it did, through the spreadsheet. The slow part was pushing products through to Printify, which used to take a very long time on a big batch. I built a tool with Claude for that too, and it is a lot faster now.
The edits after upload are unchanged, with the same tool as before. Images go up in one zip file, which takes seconds, and the trademark search runs after.
What version three can do
Add it all up and the whole run is a different size.
Around 10,000 products, in about an hour and a half of work.
The whole thing is written up as it happened, every version of it, and you can follow the next ones by email.
See you around,
Nick T
