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

**Nicole Ruiz** (0:00)
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 that where you're constantly just doing these small tasks, returns, purchasing, navigating, help emails and all this different stuff.

**Claire Vo** (0:17)
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.

**Nicole Ruiz** (0:32)
Claude Cowork is great at this.

**Claire Vo** (0:34)
Every time you need to go buy something, you're like, hey, Project, I need to buy this thing. Go make me recommendations. Claude does the web search and 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.

**Nicole Ruiz** (0:49)
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?

**Claire Vo** (1:02)
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, 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 100 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 Orkes, the company behind Open Source Conductor, which powers complex workflows and process orchestration for modern enterprise apps in agentic workflows.
Legacy business process automation tools are breaking down. Siloed low-code platforms, outdated process management systems, and disconnected API management tools weren't built for today's AI-powered world. Orkes changes that. With Orkes Conductor, you get a modern orchestration layer that scales with high reliability and brings humans, AI, and systems together in real time. It's not just about tasks, it's about orchestrating everything. APIs, microservices, data pipelines, human-in-the-loop actions, and even autonomous agents. So build, test, and debug complex workflows with ease, all while maintaining enterprise-grade security, compliance, and observability. Orkes, orchestrate the future of work.
Learn more and start building at orkes.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.

**Nicole Ruiz** (2:49)
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 tool, some items, some clothing, and being so panicked and stressed, and there are just other things that feel way more important. So you put the thing in your Amazon cart and you click purchase. 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 brightly colored version, or honestly, it was just made poorly, or even more recently, we've seen that like Amazon was sending stuff from basically knockoff brands. 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. 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 extraordinary craftsmanship, or maybe you specifically want to support small brands and artisans and craftspeople. I also had that problem as well, where I would have a website from the farmer's market by her house, but I wouldn't remember the one thing that they sold that I wanted to buy. When the time actually comes to buy the nice knit sweater that was handmade, but you don't remember where that website is or how to find that person. At the moment, I have this long Apple notes list of like, here's where I go to for a sweater, here's where I would go to for a wooden comb. But again, I needed something between the huge Amazon query center of all those shops and all of those providers and the tiny website that is inevitably impossible to search.