Key Takeaways:
- Carve Designs uses Claude Chat as a central AI hub connecting Shopify, NetSuite, Meta and historical data across the company.
- The Raspberry platform generates realistic product visuals from photos or CADs, cutting down on physical sampling and photoshoots.
- VP of Marketing Jen Wilson says AI is pushing brands toward more niche positioning and more specific, personalized marketing.
In 2003, Jennifer Hinton and Thayer Sylvester were on a Mexico surf trip when they found themselves longing for beachwear that could keep up with them, while still looking and feeling great. It was there, dreaming of gear for adventurous women, that they decided to start Carve Designs.
Now, more than 20 years later, the company is bigger and busier than ever. In the years since its launch with boardshorts and rashguards, it’s expanded beyond surfwear and now includes beachy apparel, denim, and accessories among its offerings. As its product lines have evolved, so have operations: Carve Designs has been steadily incorporating AI throughout the business and finding new ways to streamline so it can stay focused on the creative.
Jen Wilson, VP of Marketing for Carve, chatted with Shop Eat Surf Outdoor about which AI products the company uses most, how it uses them, and what she thinks the lifestyle apparel industry might look like in a few years.
What are some of the AI tools that you’re using in your day-to-day work?
Jen Wilson, VP of Marketing, Carve Designs: Big ones that are used across the company are Claude Chat and we just brought in Raspberry. Claude’s probably the biggest that we’ve invested in as the brain of the operation. We’ve added all of our connection points to all of our platforms there, so it’s our new source of truth: It’s understanding Shopify. It’s understanding NetSuite. It’s understanding what’s happening in Meta. It’s understanding what’s happening across every plugin we have, and it has our historical data we add into it.
Where we’ve typically had data sources separated out, Claude has been a place that we can bring it all together, and it’s been a much more comprehensive place for everyone to input and question into.
Raspberry is this really neat product-creation AI platform. The product team can actually put in either photos of products that they’ve seen or CADs from things they’ve created, and it will start generating what it thinks it’s going to look like in real life. Instead of having to do samples on samples on samples, we can get something back really quickly and say, ‘Oh, actually, we don’t like the proportions on that,’ or, ‘Oh, actually, that cuff looks weird.’
It’s been this wild walk for both product and creative to have a tool that can do all of this really intense production work in one place.
When it comes to what it can export on the backend, from my perspective in marketing, I’m looking for anything that can make the content production get more efficient and more effective. Paying a photographer to hold a camera and shoot a photo as a flat lay 400 times is not a great use of their time or ours. If Raspberry can do that for me, then I’m saving time and I’m saving money and taking a menial task and putting it into AI.
In terms of Claude, it sounds like you’ve been able to customize it for Carve Designs and your specific needs?
Jen Wilson:  You’re building what you want from it. For instance, we use a lot of AI agents and we’re saying, okay, ‘These are the metrics we care about. These are the KPIs we care about. Send everyone in the company a Slack message every morning that has details on where these KPIs are hitting and recommendations on what we should or shouldn’t do because of them.’ Everyone gets a Slack message that gives us updates and some recommendations that sometimes are worthy of doing and sometimes are not worthy of doing.
But you start your day with, ‘I know exactly where we’re starting and I can move to the task-management phase, versus let me dig through and figure out what happened yesterday or overnight or in the last seven days.’
Given that you’re using all these new tools and solutions, is that changing how you hire? And if so, how?
Jen Wilson: Yes and no. We are not anywhere near a point where we would be replacing anyone’s job for AI, but I’m definitely looking for AI literacy and AI enthusiasm.
The other way that it makes me think about hiring is that the greatest things come out of the combination of art and science. There’s got to be a lot of data and science, and then there’s got to be a little sprinkle of art magic that goes on it, and that’s where things can be their very best.
From a hiring standpoint, AI solves science. I need people to be more (art-focused), and that doesn’t mean that I need more creative people. But I’m looking at people and I’m saying, ‘Are you a problem solver? Are you a curious thinker? Are you going to take what AI gives you and say, “Oh, that’s a good idea, and I can layer this other idea on top of it,”‘ and not just take it.
From a soft skills perspective, I’m looking at hiring people as like, ‘How can you be the special sauce on top of the science?’
Is AI adoption changing consumer behavior or how you interact with your customers?
Jen Wilson: There are two things that stand out for me.
One is the more obvious one, which is the way that people are searching and where people are searching. You as a consumer are probably searching differently. You’re going into Google and saying, ‘I need a swimsuit for this activity,’ and it is recommending you answers based off of more specific questions. That is changing how we think about SEO and AIO (AI optimization), but just accelerating a trend that has been there for a while, which is personalization. People are putting in search details like, ‘I’m this tall. I’m doing this activity. I want this coverage. I’m going to Hawaii. Give me my perfect match.’
And if that’s the way that you’re searching, well, we need to match that in the level of explicitness that we are putting into the messaging that we are creating, so it is changing how we are marketing our products, what we’re putting on the website, the backend data that we’re putting on it, so that it rises to the level of your specificity.
It’s even changing the types of channels that we use. For instance, PR is now even more important because the way that LLMs are scraping the internet for data prioritizes PR more than a lot of other stuff. Press releases are becoming important, so it’s really brought back more traditional marketing channels, which is interesting.
The other thing I think about a lot is how culture sort of works in these pendulums, right? As one pendulum swings here, the other side is also going to swing, and as AI makes things potentially less trustworthy online, people are going to look at everything and be like, ‘Is that AI?’ The other side of the pendulum is going to swing also into wanting things that are real and physical and in person; I think you’re going to see that trend also continue to be really strong.
Along with that pendulum swing, what else might look different in the lifestyle apparel industry three years from now?
Jen Wilson: My instinct is that brands will become more niche, and they will have more specific messaging, and they will stand for more specific things, so that they can rise in that specificity of the way that the consumer is looking for products.
How is that changing how you approach marketing and storytelling?Â
Jen Wilson: The idea of being more niche and more specific in our messaging is definitely something that we have already brought into the creative and the marketing funnel. How we can think about personalization and making sure that you’re getting exactly what you want has been part of the foundation that we’ve been building.
One of the stories that has been a product of some of this is what we’re calling our Surf to Sweat collection; there’s a group in our swim (catalog) that we’ve designed that works like sportswear. We have a swim top that looks like a sports bra, and it’s made out of compression fabric, which is naturally activewear material. You get this unlock of value that way, and it means that we’re going to show up in a lot more places in your search results. This is one creative way to solve for that that feels really true to us.
