Ep 186: How Rat & Boa Turned the Restock Gap Into Revenue, with Alister Hewitt, Technology & Operations Director at Rat & Boa and Co-Founder of Prebuy

On this episode I sit down with Alister Hewitt, Technology and Operations Director at Rat & Boa and co-founder of Prebuy.Alister has been with the brand since the very beginning. He built the first website for a friend launching a clothing label, and within a couple of months the orders were flying in. He describes what Rat & Boa actually is: born on Instagram in 2014, back when the platform had no product tags and no stories and brands used it as a mood board, built around the founders' aesthetic, worn organically by the likes of Bella Hadid and Alexa Chung, and still run by a far smaller team than people assume.Most of the conversation is about the problem that comes with being a viral brand. Collections sell out in a couple of days, the rebuy window runs six to eight weeks and sometimes ten, and back-in-stock alerts were only converting at five to ten per cent. Alister's view is that preorders look like a product page feature and are really a supply chain one. Change the CTA and you just push the problem into the warehouse, the merch team and the customer service inbox. That is where Prebuy came from.The second half is about how far AI has gone inside the business. A dev team that is almost AI native, with Cursor as the harness. A CRO audit skill the digital team built themselves. Gorgias and Shopify MCPs in customer service. A server in the building running local models, because the token bill is climbing. And why Alister thinks agentic shopping is sitting exactly where mobile commerce sat a decade ago.Enjoy the show.