Why we left DecoNetwork
DecoNetwork is built for decorated apparel, and it proved a lot of what a workwear business needs is possible: live stock feeds from suppliers, a logo uploaded with the order, customisation on each line. We took all of that with us as the bar to beat.
We were still renting, though. Every custom page went in as a self-contained widget with its styles pasted inline, one URL at a time. When we audited its settings, about 70% were features we would never use: affiliate hosting, commissions, fundraiser campaigns, white-label drop-ship. And the exit terms delete your orders and customer records when you leave, so leaving meant getting every order out first. Those old orders now sit in a read-only Deco Vault inside our own system, so the team can still look one up.
The line I wrote at the start of the build plan was this:
"One owned platform that runs the whole business. Shop, production floor, suppliers, money, marketing. Every screen ours to change the day we need it changed."
What we built: BETSY
BETSY is the back office. The engine underneath is Medusa, an open-source commerce framework, which handles the database, the workflows, payments and the APIs. We left that engine alone and built every screen a person touches ourselves. Two benchmarks: EKM for how simple an admin screen should feel, DecoNetwork for what it has to be able to do.
- Orders to production. Orders, quotes, production sheets, stock, purchasing, returns, invoices and statements, across 66 admin screens.
- Suppliers feeding the machine. Seven supplier connections pull stock and prices every hour, so availability runs on real numbers.
- Money. Sales invoices, payments, credit notes and stock movements post straight to Sage. Sales invoices have been posting live since 10 August.
- Selling. One product feed built from BETSY for Google Shopping, a Stripe checkout with Apple Pay and Google Pay, trade account applications and quote requests.
- Tested. 5,152 automated tests passing as of 21 September.
The shop itself, now bay38workwear.com, is a separate Next.js storefront reading from BETSY. About 3,500 products, size guides, local pages, a blog and a customer account area.
The AI bit, in two layers
Agents inside the business
BETSY has 22 named agent seats, each with one job, and 19 of them are built. The Mail Man reads the inbox, sorts it, links emails to the right order and learns the rules staff teach it. The Accountant files supplier bills. The Bookkeeper is the on/off switch for posting to Sage. The Credit Controller sends statements and chases payments. Others send abandoned-basket reminders, email tracking numbers that turn up late, and keep test-buying through the checkout to prove it still works. Anything that matters waits for a person to approve it.
Agents building it
The code was written by a team of AI coding agents working alongside us, each in its own named slot and all sharing one memory, a system we call Anima. Of BETSY's 1,893 commits, 1,265 are co-authored by Claude, which is 67%. On the storefront it's 530 of 613, or 86%. Across both, more than 700 pull requests have been merged. Nothing merges or goes live until a human says so.
The humans: Nathan owns the business and set the scope, Owen designs the look, Dan ran the operations side through the switch, and I led the build.
37 days, start to trading
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2 Apr | BETSY named and specced |
| 16 Jun | First commit: BETSY scaffolded on Medusa v2 |
| 23 Jul | clothinghouse.co.uk switches to the new shop and BETSY |
| 1 Aug | BETSY's own sales ledger starts |
| 8 Aug | DecoNetwork switched off for good |
| 10 Aug | Sales invoices posting to Sage, proven live |
| 17 Sep | Rebrand to BAY38 Workwear: decided 09:07, live 15:05 |
Then we changed the name
Clothing House had three problems as a name. Nobody liked it, it had no keyword in it, and Bay38 should be the root brand of everything we do. So on 17 September it became BAY38 Workwear.
The decision was made at 09:07 and the new site was live at 15:05. Because BETSY and the storefront read the brand name and the domain from one setting each, the rename was mostly a settings change. Every one of roughly 3,500 addresses now redirects in a single hop to the same page on bay38workwear.com. We also dropped the old /gb from every address in the same move, so search engines only had to learn one change. Search Console's change of address, Merchant Center, the ad accounts and the Business Profile were all repointed by the next day. Owen's new logo gave the mascot a hard hat in place of his beanie.
If you're on DecoNetwork and thinking about it
- Export everything before you give notice. Orders, customers, artwork, the lot. Their terms delete it when you go.
- Run old and new side by side until someone signs the new one off. No cutover cliffs.
- Keep the payment engine boring and own the screens. The engine is the part you don't want to reinvent. The screens are where your business actually lives.
- Move your URLs once. Fold every address change into one migration, with one redirect hop.
Want one?
Bay38 builds this. If you run a trade, workwear or decorated apparel business and you've hit the ceiling of the platform you rent, talk to Bay38. For the business side of the story, Nathan is at nathtaylor.com. And if you need workwear, the shop is at bay38workwear.com.