Case Study · Custom Apparel
Claude at every layer, from storefront to sales desk
Exora wanted a platform where customers could choose from a deep apparel catalog, upload custom branding, and get fast, high-quality DTF printing and delivery. DBAI rebuilt it end to end — Claude powering the customer experience, the automation layer, and the internal tools the team runs on every day.
- Client
- Exora INK · exora.ink
- Industry
- Custom apparel & DTF printing
- Context
- A large SanMar product catalog spanning multiple apparel brands, sold through a self-service storefront to a growing B2B client base.
The challenge
Exora's existing infrastructure was slow, manually operated, and impossible to scale — the gaps were costing revenue every day.
- A site that dragged
- Load times were degrading customer experience and conversion across every device and traffic level — a bloated legacy theme doing daily damage.
- A catalog updated by hand
- The full SanMar product catalog had no automated connection to the storefront — every price, variant and stock update was a manual operation.
- Estimates built by cross-referencing
- Sales quoting relied entirely on staff manually cross-referencing product data, pricing tiers and availability.
- Nobody home after hours
- No intelligent front-end layer existed to capture leads or guide customers outside business hours — off-hours interest simply evaporated.
Before
- Catalog management
- A large catalog maintained through hundreds of individually managed SKU updates.
- Site performance
- A slow, bloated legacy theme.
- Lead capture (off-hours)
- None — no coverage outside business hours.
- Sales estimating
- Manual cross-referencing of product data and pricing tiers.
- Staff product research
- Manual catalog lookup.
What we built
Four deliverables, one system: a faster storefront, a catalog that maintains itself, and an AI layer serving customers and staff alike.
How it's built
01
WooCommerce platform rebuild
Migrated from a bloated legacy UNCODE build to a performance-optimized XStore implementation, designed from the outset to handle catalog-level scale.
02
SanMar catalog automation
A fully automated n8n pipeline connects directly to SanMar's SFTP feed — ingesting, normalizing and syncing the catalog across every brand into Exora's WooCommerce store. Zero manual catalog maintenance.
03
Customer-facing Claude chatbot
A Claude-powered assistant deployed on exora.ink as an always-on engagement and lead-capture layer — trained on Exora's products, turnaround times and printing capabilities, routing quote requests to the team via real-time webhook notifications.
04
Internal staff assistant
A Claude-powered backend assistant for Exora's sales, estimating and marketing team — connected to the same data layer as the storefront, so every answer is grounded in Exora's actual inventory and pricing, not generic AI output.
Agents & automation
- SanMar catalog automation
- Automated product creation and updates, variant and inventory sync, brand and category organization, error logging and failure recovery.
- Customer chatbot
- Product and printing Q&A, quote guidance, lead capture, 24/7 after-hours support, real-time Slack notifications, full conversation context.
- Internal assistant
- Product research in natural language across the full catalog, plain-language estimating with margin targets, best-fit product recommendations, specs and campaign assets at scale.
The stack
- CLAUDE
- Development engine, customer chatbot, internal assistant
- N8N
- Automation orchestration & workflow pipelines
- WOOCOMMERCE
- E-commerce platform
- XSTORE
- WooCommerce theme framework
- SANMAR
- SFTP product catalog data source
Built with Claude — the development engine
Every automation workflow, API integration and n8n pipeline in this project was built using Claude as the primary development intelligence — architecting, writing and iterating on the system while maintaining production-grade quality throughout.
The result
The manual layer — catalog upkeep, cross-referenced estimates, staffed-hours-only responsiveness — disappeared into software.
- Catalog management
- Synced automatically from the SanMar feed instead of updated by hand.
- Site performance
- A faster storefront on a performance-built theme.
- Lead capture (off-hours)
- Active around the clock via the Claude chatbot.
- Customer response time
- Instant for common queries instead of staff-dependent.
- Sales estimating
- AI-assisted quoting instead of manual cross-referencing.
- Staff product research
- Natural-language search across the full catalog instead of manual lookup.
Related capabilities
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