Hey Bud Skincare: an inventory agent that runs every morning

Whose business is this?

Hey Bud Skincare is owned and run by the people behind On Autopilot. It sells online through Shopify and through Australian retailers, keeps its stock at a third-party logistics warehouse, and has its products made by contract manufacturers. That is a common shape for an Australian product brand, and a messy one to keep track of: stock, sales, purchase orders and invoices all live in different systems.

Its inventory system was built in-house by Ollie Watts, who runs marketing across our businesses and is not a developer, using Claude Code. That is the point of this case study: the same tools and approach we sell, used on a business whose numbers we live with.

What runs every day

Every run writes a summary record. If any step fails, it raises a critical alert naming how many steps failed, and critical problems are emailed.

How we built it safely

1. Read first, act later. The early versions only read data and reported. Steps that change records were added one at a time once the reads had proved reliable.
2. Never enshrine bad data. If the warehouse returns an incomplete catalogue, the run marks the stock as untrustworthy and skips every irreversible step, including the month-end snapshot and the out-of-stock emails to retailers.
3. Drafts, not decisions. Purchase orders are created as drafts for a person to approve. A person decides what gets ordered.
4. Make silence visible. Scheduled jobs fail quietly, so the dashboard shows how long ago the last sync ran: green under 12 hours, amber to 24, red after that.
5. Write it down. The system has a plain-English handbook covering every scheduled job, what breaks if it stops, and how to check it, so it does not depend on one person’s memory.

What it changed

The summary is qualitative: stock problems now show up in the morning instead of when someone happens to look, reorder decisions start from a list rather than a spreadsheet hunt, and month-end starts from an automatic snapshot. We have not published before-and-after figures because we did not measure a clean baseline before building it, and we will not estimate one after the fact.

Can On Autopilot build this for my business?

Yes, at two levels. AI Inventory Watch is the productised version for Shopify stores: $497 setup and $99 a month (AUD, ex GST), a daily stock check with alerts to your team, live in days. See the AI Inventory Watch service page. Bigger systems that also touch your warehouse, Xero and suppliers are quoted at a fixed price after a free 30-minute audit, and can be run for you on managed AI from $1,500 a month.

For the costs behind decisions like this, see the 2026 AI Cost Index (modelled), and our other own-business builds: the DotVA lead pipeline and the Lead Gen Empire network.