How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers | Yana Welinder

How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers | Yana Welinder

August 17, 2026 · 33 min

About this episode

Yana Welinder discusses her journey as a solo founder using AI tools to create a fashion brand without engineers.

Yana Welinder is the solo founder of Yana Bana, an AI-native fashion brand built with AI as her technical co-founder, starting from hand-drawn sketches and ending with runway photos, CAD files for 3D printing, and a live Stripe-connected pre-order site—no engineers required. A former product leader, she brings an operator’s rigor to her creative process: her “fashion prompt” is a detailed spec covering silhouette, volume, fabric behavior, movement, and sound, and watching her use Codex plus computer use to navigate 3D design software that’s entirely new to her is a clarifying demo of what today’s toolset actually makes possible. What you’ll learn: How Yana uses a custom fashion prompt as a technical spec to get consistent, realistic, on-design outputs Why ChatGPT Images 2.0 outperforms other models for fashion design How she uses Codex plus computer use to operate CAD and fashion software she’s never personally learned The workflow for taking a garment from hand-drawn sketch to product photo, runway photo, and influencer shot in a single session How she ran vendor outreach end to end using deep research and browser use How she built a full e-commerce site with voting, databases…

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Merge, Jira

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