Shopping with Claude: How to find quality brands, automate returns, and buy things that last 100 years | Nicole Ruiz

0:00Nicole Ruiz:The modern world is just rife with online administrative tasks where parents become the human link between all of these really, really hard to navigate systems where you're constantly just doing these small tasks, returns, purchasing, navigating, help emails and all this different stuff. I totally have the mental overload of having to buy something for my kids or my family or myself. And then going through this kind of invisible checklist of like, is it made of a natural fiber? Is it sourced locally? Can I get it delivered in the next week? Because otherwise I'll just forget it. Claude co-workers created this.

0:34Every time you need to go buy something, you're like, hey, project, I need to buy this thing. Go make new recommendations. Claude does the web search. Frank comes back and makes some recommendations of you to purchase. Everybody's like, this lady's letting robots raise their kids. And I think it's just the total opposite of that.

0:49Nicole Ruiz:Why would you not automate the administrative work so that you can spend more time with your kids and your family and the people around you rather than the digital systems that our life is made of navigating?

1:02Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have Nicole Ruiz, and she's going to show us how she uses Claude to shop for everything. but not anything. She only wants high quality things that last and she's using AI to make sure that the stuff that comes in her house is going to last for a hundred years. I love her tips and tricks and this is a really useful one for all the parents out there trying to keep their kids in high quality items. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Orcus, the company behind Open Source Conductor, which powers complex workflows and process orchestration for modern enterprise apps in agentic workflows.

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2:23Orcus. Orchestrate the future of work. Learn more and start building at orcus.io. Nicole, I am excited to have you on How I AI because we are going to talk about something we have not in an entire year of the podcast. talked about yet, which is how to buy better with AI. Tell me about the problem that you were having as a very busy mom.

2:48Nicole Ruiz:I often am buying baby stuff. This is now our second baby. We're two months in. And I think every parent knows the feeling of needing some sort of tool, some sort of item, some sort of clothing, and being so panicked and stressed. And they're just other things that feel way more important. And so you put the thing in your Amazon cart and you click purchase. And then later you realize you really didn't want that version of the thing. You did not want the crappy plastic version. You didn't want the like brightly colored version, or honestly it was just like made poorly. Or even more recently, we've seen that like Amazon was sending stuff from, from basically knockoff brands.

3:23Nicole Ruiz:And so you also don't want that for your children. You don't want like random products made by a third party seller. So I was thinking about this and how I could get more items in our home that were specifically thoughtfully made, that were made of natural materials, which I think is a big trend right now broadly, and also things that we could mend and take care of. We've been trying to do this a lot in the household, but it takes a while to find the brands that you really like. It takes a while to find brands that will actually take returns, which you need to do a lot as a parent as well if something doesn't fit what you're looking for.

3:52Nicole Ruiz:And so often when I'm starting a query online, I would just realize a ton of these were paid ads, which has been a problem for forever. A ton of these are so highly indexed on your specific keyword. And so they're selling this one product and that's not really what you want either. You really want either an incredibly trustworthy brand that has a history of like extraordinary craftsmanship, or maybe you specifically want to support small brands and artisans and craftspeople. And I also had that problem as well, where I would have a website from like the farmer's market by our house, but I wouldn't remember the one thing that they sold that I wanted to buy.

4:26Nicole Ruiz:And so when the time actually comes to buy the nice knit sweater that was handmade. Like you don't remember where that website is or how to find that person. And so at the moment I had this long Apple notes list of like, here's where I go to for a sweater. Here's where I would go to for like a wooden comb. But again, I needed something between like the huge Amazon query center of all those shops and all of those providers and the tiny, tiny website that is inevitably impossible to search. And so I decided to make this household management project in Claude here, where I started by just consolidating all of these shops, the shops that I ground level, absolutely trusted.

5:06Nicole Ruiz:They had a history of either vetting their vendors very, very highly, or they themselves were people who were directly employing like craftspeople, people had really, really high standards of makership and had been around for several years. So why I did this is this project in and of itself is going to hold a specific set of instructions, going to hold specific memory. And so if I'm asking about buying something more broadly outside of this context, I don't necessarily want Claude to actually overfit to all of the instructions that I have for this project. And this just helps me keep this set of instructions and this memory of all of my purchasing separate from all of my other queries, because I think it just keeps it organized.

5:51Nicole Ruiz:Basically, I say, first of all, go through this list. And I give it the criteria of how I chose these lists for all of the things that I mentioned. There's decades of the business. They've been sought out for this product for a long time and that they're made to last and repair. I've also found that Claude is very good at surfacing whether or not a brand stands behind return policies. If things are made poorly, if your kid wears through them really quickly, who will actually take those returns and take them quickly and easily? So I have this long list of brands here, which I'll send Claude just take straight from my Apple notes.

6:23Nicole Ruiz:I dumped it in and asked it to help me organize this. Down here, I also just have some other quick rules, which are that once it gets through that list, it should look for another preferred vendor. It has a few different ways it should think about that. I also say we really want to avoid trendy direct-to-consumer brands that I think are paying a lot for advertising and probably under-investing in quality. and I also talk a little bit about formatting the results that they get for each item that I'm searching for. So I want it to specifically surface the name of the product. I want it to surface a photo.

6:57Nicole Ruiz:I want it to surface price and then the materials that it's made out of because often I'll see something that's really nice and then down exceptionally low is that it's made mostly out of plastic and so I want that up front and center. And then also any care and maintenance notes so if I'm buying baby clothes but it says in a small thing like only hand wash this item your kid is going to be wearing every day I want to know that maybe I'll make that decision but I want that to be up front I'll link to the purchasable item and then again a brief note on why the brand has a trustworthy history that is the part I love the most the trustworthy history even yesterday I put something into Claude and it basically surfaced that this brand got taken over two years ago and ever since then all the reviews have been abysmal before then it was great now it's not don't buy from them.

7:41Nicole Ruiz:And that's so helpful. That's exactly what I want to know. What I love about what you're showing us here is, yes, this is how I AI. So of course, all these project instructions are in a clod project and are going to be used by this AI to surface great purchases for you. But this is also how I life. And so just quick pause for folks, like keeping a list of vendors that you really like or think are high quality, and then also just writing down how you make purchasing decisions. And I call this sort of like the anti-to-do list. It's one of the things that should be on people's personal anti-to-do list, which is I totally have the mental overload of having to buy something for my kids or my family or myself.

8:21and then going through this kind of invisible checklist of like is it made of a natural fiber is it sourced locally like can I get it delivered in the next week because otherwise I'll just forget it can it be returned can I buy a resale which is also something I see in your prompt and this is sort of like this invisible checklist that I go through every time I purchase something and sitting down and just taking the effort to say like my invisible checklist is now a visible checklist in a cloud project that I can use over and over and over again is just going to like reduce the mental overhead of this task little by little.

8:57And it happens probably multiple times a day, at least multiple times a week. And so just the general concept of doing this, even if it's not purchasing things, but it's something else in your household that requires two or three checks of quality or process or whatever it might be. It's a great use case for something like a claw project.

9:17Nicole Ruiz:Totally. And I think this came out of noticing that I was doing a lot of household maintenance of items that were bought more poorly than I wanted them to be. And so I thought, why don't I just try to move as much of the setting upstream as possible? I really, we live in Brooklyn, we live in an apartment that is space constrained. And so whenever we're buying something, I want it to be something that's going to stand the test of time. So I don't have to maintain it more later. Or if I do that, there's a very simple policy to send it back to the manufacturer and make sure they'll stand behind that and that they'll also be behind that product for multiple decades.

9:47Nicole Ruiz:I also for a long time had a notion of all the items that I was purchasing because I was starting to write reviews of like did this stand up did it get holes in it immediately and so just being able to track this through Clawden more formally really speeds up buying things that are very well vetted in a world where I think the internet is only going to get more noisy around brands that are actually trustworthy. I also have a line about like please try to suss out AI reviews, please read a lot of reviews. But if it sounds like AI, don't listen to those reviews. Please try to guess whether or not this brand is a dropshipping brand.

10:21Nicole Ruiz:Just a lot of the modern shopping internet pitfalls that happen, let's try to avoid those as quickly as possible and sort through from the noise to the actual quality indicators. While you're going to the next step, I have to laugh about another use case people might think of, which is I have this pile of returns. And I know we're going to get to returns in a minute, So everybody hold your horses. But I have a pile of returns for very specific reasons. And it's because I always buy stuff in the wrong size. Like it is everything from I bought a throw pillow in the wrong size for my pillow to like I accidentally bought a outdoor patio furniture set that's like teeny tiny.

10:57It did not look teeny tiny on the photos, but it was like like actually a very petite chair. chair. And so again, it may not be quality. It could be, I always get the size wrong. So like make sure I understand the size of what I'm buying. Or remember when I'm buying shoes for my kids, they run a half size large. And so like work at size guides and stuff like that, I think is really, really interesting and helpful just to build yourself a little checklist, but let's see this thing in, in action. So what would you buy? And are we going to get a better result out of it?

11:27Nicole Ruiz:let's start so i have been looking for a can opener our can openers always break i think nobody knows how to design a can opener so let's just say help me find a can opener and i think one of the good things about this also is just that all of your context right are in those project instructions already and so you don't have to spend a lot of time composing your prompt this is really funny for folks that didn't see your screen i feel like you and i are the same person because we're not in the market for a can opener because ours works, but it is impossible to understand how to use. It is like a very advanced can opener in a non-standard design, and everybody comes to my house and can't open it.

12:04But I also saw like cradle cap comb. I'm looking for one of those. A kind of nice looking soccer kit jersey because my kids will wear nothing but soccer kits, but they are atrocious in like just an assault on the eyes. So I am shopping for the exact same thing. So I'm really excited to see what this Claude project can do for me. But let's see what it got us from a can opener perspective.

12:31Nicole Ruiz:So we've got a few pictures right away. You can see that these two pictures are either exactly the same or something very similar. So you can tell right off the bat it's searching through Boston General Store, which I love because they're a store that vets vendors. They go, they test out all the products for you, and then they put them in a website. So it's like layers of work just done. They're testing these brands. They've tested the product actually works. That's amazing. They're searching through that site for me, so I don't have to do that. They're looking at some other sites. Right away, they come up with this Nogent Super Kim can opener, which is great.

13:04Nicole Ruiz:They have the price front and center, also great. Because the other thing I've been most stunned about this is a lot of websites that I would think are going to list much higher-end things end up listing items that are like target prices. so it really is just making it easier to shop for a quality thing for the same price range which I value really highly it's actually changed since last time I did the query the first time I did the query I came up with two results for this first can opener here I forget the other store that carried it so right away I was like you can see this brand was established almost 100 years ago they're known for specifically doing a lot of products like this and it has great reviews and so right off the bat I'm interested in that when I first searched this it was clear cut because there was two reviews for the same place something that I might do is like are there any downsides in the reviews you see on the websites and you can sort of dig into the things you might be worried about and keep prompting and it'll just search sort of the whole internet landscape for you which again just super nice when you're a mom who doesn't have a lot of time or you don't really care about spending so much time to browse the internet but would you you would like a nice thing and so it'll just do that for you and you can come back to it and sort of just make a choice and then we'll go to the website here it's ready to purchase so it did actually find it on two different websites manufactum and boston general store so i could immediately just purchase that and we're ready to go do you go back and tell it what you ended up buying i do generally when i can not all the time especially not for clothing because i haven't perfected the clothing buying processing process yet partially because of what you're talking about which is sizing i'm trying to get it to understand sizing very cohesively in our household and is helpful for going through the website size guides which are often not standard to the sort of like general international sizing but yeah i try to tell it what i buy and it definitely it gets definitely improves over time it will sometimes surface new vendors that we really like do you feel like you could get to a point where you would let this shop for you or do you still like to be in the middle of it i've been working to this i i so i interviewed jesse jenna who you had on your podcast a while ago about her broader sort of theory of technology in the household and then a bit ago i like responded to one of her tweets about really wanting to standardize my costco order and a few other really regular household orders i haven't quite gotten to a spot where there's anything regular enough i think it'll take a little bit more of an iteration like you're saying to have that full cohesive project instruction to let it buy from me but i do want to get there i want to try i know she has a flow for how she lets her agents go through instacart and i think like maybe amazon as well um so i know it i know it's possible but not yet we're not there what i love about what you're showing here is you know people are really apprehensive about AI and artisans and creatives and all this stuff.

16:02But if you look at something like this, this is a way for kind of like smaller creators and smaller artisans, smaller shops to get in front of larger audiences or to make it easier for you to access those. Because again, the infrastructure of Amazon is very helpful, right? We've got the app. It has everything. I press one button, I have reviews. And so even if you can approximate that here, it's really nice to just make it easier to shop the way you want to shop, which again, benefits these like smaller companies, not just these big companies. And when people think about AI, I just want to say there are ways that AI can make small companies and individual creators and individual artisans have a better time than a worse time.

16:50Nicole Ruiz:I will add one other thing, which is just that like even disproportionately I would say like some of the oldest manufacturers of quality items their websites are the worst websites and so it actually takes you disproportionately longer to purchase from those brands and that's when I started realizing like oh this could be a great force leveler essentially for people who are still doing the thing they've been doing for 100 years but maybe they haven't hired a new web designer in the last decade and so that's It's advantage to everyone else, especially Amazon. We had Jason Levin on the podcast and he just kept saying no UX is the best UX.

17:28So if we can just pass over all those terribly designed websites and get to the thing we want, which is buying the product, everybody's happier. So just not even having to browse those is solving the problem for you. Yes. This episode is brought to you by MetaView. Because who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder, hiring manager, and recruiter I speak with feels the same pressure. Hire the right people as fast as possible. But recruiting is brutally time-consuming, alignment is hard, and the competition for great talent keeps getting tougher. That's why teams like Riot Games, Brex, GitLab, and Replit, plus 5 ,000 other organizations, use MetaView, the agentic recruiting platform giving high-performance teams an unfair advantage in hiring.

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18:51Nicole Ruiz:Yeah. So to continue the shopping flow, exactly. You've gotten the product to your home. Maybe it actually does not hold up to standards. I think if you have kids, you often see this loops fed run, basically. You see that the garment you bought four months ago that you thought would be great for really intense outdoor play does not stand up to your expectations, especially if you did want to invest in a more quality item. Essentially what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to Claude Cowork over here because I want it to help me access my Gmail and a number of other things. I would often do this on my phone through dispatch.

19:26Nicole Ruiz:So I'd take a picture of the item with my phone as I find it in my household because otherwise I'm going to forget to do it. I would pop it into dispatch. In this case, we have this picture of J.Crew pants that immediately wore through the butt. So I'm sending them back. in reality I would press whisper flow on my laptop because I'm often doing something with other hands it's just a lot easier to talk to the laptop I might even be nursing a baby so this has been a game changer to be able to just talk out loud so I'd say something like I have this pair of pants of rafas from the last six months they've already worn through in the butt I'm looking to return them to j.crew and specifically get a refund can you help me draft an email and specifically start out by finding the receipt for the pants in my email, either from PayPal or J.Crew with the item number and any other details you might need.

20:19Nicole Ruiz:Please include that context and draft up the request for refund to J.Crew's customer service. So again, life hack here, which is you're not like, oh, J.Crew says that I can return it in 30 days. I'm going to return it. You're like, these pants were supposed to hold up. And so I'm getting what I was promised, which is a good set of kids' pants. And so you're basically bringing together the information you have in your email to go pursue that refund, which would be very annoying to do otherwise. Totally. I think what I have often found is just that anytime where there is like finding an email that is stuck in some website, like I know everybody has a refund policy or their customer service email listed somewhere, but it's hard to find.

21:05Nicole Ruiz:And I'm doing it like at least five times a month, if not more. If it's just lowering the impetus to get started on this like five to ten minute task, that's really helpful to me. Even if I don't take the email as it was drafted, helpful to get started and sort of like clear through some of the grunt work of navigating websites, which is Claude Cowork's strength. I also have to say while Cowork is running, I appreciate your commitment to just having like high quality things that last. Because so many people would, again, because of the friction involved, just like toss the pants and be like, I'm going to get new pants and move on with your life.

21:42And again, like figuring out how you can consume less by focusing on quality, getting AI to take away the toil of having only high quality things in your house. I think ultimately, like, again, just results in like less waste, less junk. Like, it's just it's just way better. And I do think the ability for a consumer to hold sort of a company to account on their quality promises is, again, like something that's technically possible but practically annoying. And so you have made it both technically possible and practically less annoying, which is, I'm sure, just changing your life in terms of how you can manage the stuff that's in your house.

22:29Definitely.

22:29Nicole Ruiz:Yeah, I think it's a big priority of ours and especially we would love to have a lot of children. And so I keep thinking, what things can I do up front that make it easier to maintain that system for five years? And I think a lot of it is just buying quality items they don't have to maintain. I think that used to be much more normal, but we now have, again, the noise of dropshipping, the noise of plastic, quickly manufactured clothing that are these direct-to-consumer brands that explode and then they die out in three years. And so trying to just like shove all of that to the side and get to the like, OK, what is the brand that has the strongest history here?

23:06Nicole Ruiz:Maybe actually, I don't know. Maybe you could jump backwards because there is some other things in the shopping query section where you can really drill down into like this brand known for. Let's let's wrap this. Yeah. And then look at that. Yeah. We pulled all the details. We've got the size. We've got item number. We've got the order number and when I originally purchased the item, which is helpful. So it'll put all of that detail in the draft email. So basically, Claude helped me draft this email, which was great. They immediately mentioned all the item numbers. They put it in the header. They do all of the relevant things that will make the person immediately email me back with a yes or a no rather than a query for more information.

23:49Nicole Ruiz:And they make it sound compelling. degree of deterioration is far beyond what i would expect from any garment at j cruise price point and what i have learned from this process is that actually sometimes it is a manufacturing issue um and first time i pulled this up that what they actually said is that when you look it'll go and look at the url of the item itself and a lot of people are saying the review on the website like this item had poor quality like more so than any other year of this item more so than anything else i've bought from this brand so sometimes they know there's a manufacturer's issue and they're just kind of waiting for you to be like this was not up to par and they're like oh yeah you're so right um you were paying attention and we're happy to give you a refund if not like something even better to make up your time and hope that you purchase from the brand again so click send that email super easy did that from my phone as i was walking through the house like tidying up super super fast it just drafted it from me for me i reviewed it and we were good to go so i'll often do that for this i'll do that for returns i'll have it pull up all the sort of relevant return information for a given vendor and will tell me what I need to input and I'll just tell it that.

24:54Nicole Ruiz:And again, it'll draft any info I need or it'll just email me the QR code or the receipt or whatever. And that just clears through like another five minutes of administrative online purchasing related tasks. I love it. Okay. Tell me a little bit more about shopping because you said you wanted to show a few other things. So one other thing that I might do that's related is if you have a gift card or a certain amount of money that you might want to use or clear through from a certain brand, I might say, I have$30 for LL Bean. What item should I purchase that aligns with my purchasing criteria? And again, you can really drill down on all the things you're looking for when you start a purchase query.

25:43Nicole Ruiz:Normally, I start very broad to get an idea of what's out there but you could say I want it to be easy to maintain and that will help it a lot you could say I want it to be$30 or more but not over$100 like all those things just make it much easier to shop when you have this like set of values so sometimes it'll surface these items what I've also found is that it'll bring up from a given store some of the most classic items which I really appreciate American retail has been continuously made the same way this tote for over 80 years perfect fit for heritage criteria it'll compare against some other things but i love this a team of craftspeople in brunswick maine stitched between 3 ,500 and 4 ,000 totes a day that's so great that's exactly what i want these people have been doing this for forever like this really really sounds like it'll stand up to what i need so the other thing i might do if you see sort of like a targeted ad i saw this item on another website but i really wanted to know if it was going to stand up well because i hope to use this for a long time so i might say what's your analysis of this brand are they legitimate sometimes it can be really hard to press from the website i had like clicked into the about section of the website there was not a lot to read so i often i'll get those websites and then wonder like is this just going to be a drop shipped item that doesn't even match any of the search criteria online oh no it says do not add because it looked nice it looked super aligned with the type of thing I would buy.