Will Andrews, VP of Operations at Grunt Style and a self-described operator with no development background, used Fulfil's MCP connection with Claude to build 25 micro apps in under 60 days without hiring any developers. His only cost? $200 a month for his Claude plan.
Grunt Style is a patriotic American apparel brand that has run on Fulfil for over six years. They operate 13 retail stores, sell DTC through Shopify, fulfill on Amazon, manage wholesale B2B accounts with EDI, and do their own production and embellishment in-house.
Will shared the full breakdown of what he built with the Fulfil user community during a live webinar. This article covers the tactical details: which apps he built, how long they took, what they replaced, and how other DTC operators can use AI in their ERP operations to do the same.
How to Build Micro Apps With Claude and Your ERP Data
Will's methodology was direct. Describe what you need. Hand Claude an example: a spreadsheet, an existing report, a list of columns. Tell it the key outputs you're looking for. Let Claude build it. Iterate. Deploy.
"If you have a tool that you already use in Excel, Claude can execute that unbelievably quickly," Will said. "As long as you give it its key parameters of what you're doing. For a one-off automation your team does manually, less than an hour of work between you and Claude and you could have a finished product."
The foundation was Fulfil's MCP connection with Claude, which lets micro apps pull live data directly from the ERP instead of working off exports or scheduled syncs. Will oriented everything around two data layers: a live layer for warehouse and production teams who need real-time information, and a daily or weekly refresh cadence for supply planning and selling teams.
AI Use Cases for DTC Operations: What Grunt Style Built
Sales & Operations Command Center
Every major channel (DTC, Amazon, retail, wholesale) has its own micro app. Each one combines sales data, real-time inventory on-hand, and live marketing API feeds in one place. No one has to pull data before a meeting. No one has to build a deck. The team opens the app, looks at the same view, and spends the hour problem-solving instead of reporting.
"We you spend so much time building slide decks and reports, you don't have enough time to actually analyze and get to what you need to problem solve towards," Will said. "Now we spend most of our time problem solving instead of building decks and prepping for meetings."
See related: ERP Systems for Shopify Apparel Brands in 2026: Operational Guide
Retail Command
A dedicated view for the Director of Retail, covering all 13 stores. It includes performance by store, inventory positions, and a "selling story" view: SKUs classified A/B/C, percentage of assortment, percentage of sales, and in-stock rate. Will uses this to drive store allocation decisions. High-velocity A-items with low in-stock rates get inventory first.
Pathfinder: Demand Planning
Grunt Style has six years of seasonality data in Fulfil: day-parting by hour, conversion patterns by channel, historical rolling on-hand. Pathfinder pulls all of it, connects to marketing and promotional calendars via API feeds, and gives the team a forward-looking view of what to expect.
"A lot of marketing teams only really set their marketing campaign level 30, 60 days in advance, which is great, because then I have a really good indicator from sales of what they're going to be doing to drive sales with their marketing efforts," Will explained. "And I don't have to ask them or synthesize it. I just run an update button and Claude does it for me."
See related: ERP for Fashion and Apparel Brands
Internal Shipment Automation
Grunt Style moves a lot of product internally, replenishing retail stores and fulfillment for Amazon FBA. The replenishment tool aggregates units needed by location and generates the internal shipment orders automatically. What was previously administrative work is now handled by the app. Supply planners review the analysis and approve; the system does the rest. This was one of Will's first builds and took 25 minutes.
Workflow Board
A live operations view showing what the fulfillment team is working on: which internal shipments are open, where they are in the process, in-stock status, and weeks of supply. This information used to live in a Google Sheet, but now updates automatically with no extra work from operators.
Picker Performance Dashboard
Gives warehouse managers a live view of pickers, daily performance, and open batches. Command buttons let them execute on what they see without logging into the WMS to filter and run reports manually.
Merchandising & Go-to-Market Insights
Pulls keyword research data, competitor signals from a tool called Particl via MCP, and channels it alongside Fulfil's historical sales data. This gives the merchandising team a cleaner picture of what the market wants before they commit to production.
Customer Segmentation
Fulfil acts as Grunt Style's merchant processor, so customer profile data is rich and current. Will built a segmentation tool that generates audience lists for Meta, Google, and Klaviyo campaigns, targeting new customers and existing buyers with relevant offers. "That's really enhanced our ability to target both new customers and go after our existing base," he said.
Month-End Close App
Grunt Style's controller built a financial close workflow inside Claude that replaced a third-party software package the company had been paying roughly $50K per year for. The replacement took three to five days to build and eliminated a three-year service cost of $150K.
How Will Used Claude to Enable Every Team in the Business
One of the highest-leverage things Will built wasn't a single app. It was the data dictionary that powers all of them. Every micro app has an embedded "Ask Claude" function. If someone has a question about what a metric means or how a calculation works, they can ask directly from within the tool. Claude pulls from the data dictionary, which Will updates as new apps are built.
"I embedded an ask Claude on every single micro app so that I wouldn't have to answer every question. If they had a question, they could just ask Claude," Will explained.
He also wrote the apparel operation's SOPs directly into Claude as skills, then connected them to the apps. Now the apps surface visual indicators when the team is meeting or falling short of defined standards. Rather than digging through Google Drive folders for process documentation, the guidance lives inside the tools people are already using. Fulfil stores the operational data; Claude holds the context around how to act on it.
If you want to go deeper on building with Claude, Anthropic has a free learning path at the Anthropic Academy.
25 Apps. $150K Eliminated. $200/Month.
25 micro apps in under 60 days. A rollout of this scope would typically take 12 to 18 months with traditional implementation approaches. Grunt Style reached full adoption in under three months.
$150K in software costs eliminated. The financial close module replaced an external tool the company had been paying ~$50K per year for. The replacement took three to five days to build.
~25 minutes per app for well-scoped, single-purpose automation. Longer for apps that pull from multiple data sources or require more architecture work, but the ceiling for simple use cases is genuinely low.
$200/month total cost. Will runs on the Claude Max plan. That's the entire cost of the AI layer on top of six years of Fulfil data.
What Happens When Your Team Stops Living in Spreadsheets
Beyond the cost savings, there was something else Will noticed.
When the warehouse team got the new batch processing tool, which had previously required manually filtering through the WMS, they wanted to show everyone else how to use it.
"They were so excited. They wanted to show everybody in the warehouse team how to do it because of how valuable it was. And so it was just good from a morale standpoint as well."
Getting people off laborious, repetitive work and onto a tool that does it for them is the downstream effect of having six years of clean ERP data and giving your team the ability to act on it in real time.
"The micro apps you use are only going to be as good as the data you have inside your ERP," Will said. "It's an unbelievable tool and simple to use, but you have to have process discipline."
See related: See how Grunt Style Runs Omnichannel Ops at Scale
See related: Hear Will's advice about preparing your operations for peak season