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

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 beavior, 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.

Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

What you’ll learn:

1. How Yana uses a custom fashion prompt as a technical spec to get consistent, realistic, on-design outputs
2. Why ChatGPT Images 2.0 outperforms other models for fashion design
3. How she uses Codex plus computer use to operate CAD and fashion software she’s never personally learned
4. The workflow for taking a garment from hand-drawn sketch to product photo, runway photo, and influencer shot in a single session
5. How she ran vendor outreach end to end using deep research and browser use
6. How she built a full e-commerce site with voting, databases, and Stripe integration
7. Why she’s testing human patternmakers and Codex in parallel

Brought to you by:

Merge—Connective infrastructure for production AI

Jira AI SDLC—Get your tokens’ worth with Jira

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introducing Yana Welinder and Yana Bana

(02:38) Tour of the Yana Bana site

(05:20) The fashion prompt stack

(07:39) Live demo: generating a jacket from a prompt in ChatGPT

(10:01) Why Image Gen 2.0 beats other models

(11:51) The “prompt as spec” principle

(14:02) Iterating the design

(17:12) Using Codex and computer use to build CAD files in 3D software

(20:50) Vendor research, outreach emails, and Superhuman browser use

(23:34) Building the full e-commerce site

(27:40) Quick recap and what’s still hard

(30:05) How Yana prompts when AI pushes back

(31:15) Where to find Yana and how to vote on her garments

Tools referenced:

• ChatGPT (Images 2.0): https://chat.openai.com

• Codex (OpenAI): https://openai.com/codex

• CLO 3D (fashion pattern software): https://www.clo3d.com

• Vercel: https://vercel.com

• GitHub: https://github.com

• Stripe: https://stripe.com

• Superhuman: https://superhuman.com

Other references:

• Ruth Asawa: https://ruthasawa.com

• SFMOMA (Ruth Asawa): https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Ruth_Asawa/

Where to find Yana Welinder:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ywelinder/

X: https://x.com/yanabana

Website: https://www.yanabana.com

Where to find Claire Vo:

ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/

Website: https://clairevo.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/

X: https://x.com/clairevo

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.