Meet Bobbin: The AI Agent That Chases Your Samples (and Waits for Your OK)

Most of running a small clothing brand isn't design. It's follow-up. The proto was due Tuesday and nobody's heard from the factory. The tracking number you were promised never came. Your consultant answered a fit question in a text thread you can't find. A quote came back with a fabric you didn't ask for, and you only noticed after you said yes.

None of that is hard work. It's just constant, and it falls through the cracks the week you're busy with something else.

So we built Bobbin. Bobbin is the AI agent inside Runsheet. It watches your styles, samples and factory email, drafts the follow-ups you'd otherwise forget, and answers questions about your own work. It has one rule we didn't bend on: Bobbin drafts, you decide. Nothing goes to a factory or a client until you press send, and nothing it suggests changes your records until you tick it.

Here's what it does, how the approval part works, and where it stops.

What Bobbin actually does

It chases samples that have gone quiet

This is the job that made us build it. Every day, Bobbin looks at the samples on your sampling rounds and flags the ones that have stalled:

• Requested or in work, and late. The ETA has passed, or there's no ETA and it's been sitting in that status for 10+ days.
• Shipped, but not really. No tracking number two days after it was marked shipped, or the ETA is three days gone and nobody has marked it received.

When one trips, Bobbin writes the follow-up to the factory, naming the style, the sample and what's missing, and parks it in your dashboard as a draft. You read it, edit it if you like, and press Approve & send. It also shows up on your notifications bell and your to-do list, so you don't have to go looking.

It's polite about it, too. Bobbin chases a sample at most twice, waits at least five days between chases, and stays quiet if the factory moved the sample or left a note in the last few days. The second follow-up uses different words from the first, because nothing reads more like a robot than the same email twice.

It files factory email and pulls out what changed

Every style and every sampling project in Runsheet has its own email address. Copy it on your factory thread, or have the factory reply to Bobbin's follow-up, and the email files itself on the right style, attachments included. You still get a copy in your inbox, and you reply straight to the factory as usual.

If the reply plainly says the sample shipped, gives a tracking number or gives a new date, Bobbin updates the sample for you and tells you what it changed. It only fills in blanks or moves things forward. It never moves a sample backward on a guess.

It also reads the email for anything that touches your purchase orders: a new ship date, a new quantity, or a price change. Those show up as a short list of changes you can tick, with price increases flagged along with what they add to the order, and Bobbin drafts your reply. You can paste in any factory email too, from wherever it landed.

And once a factory answers, the conversation is yours again. Bobbin withdraws any pending chase for that sample and won't chase it again until its status moves or two weeks pass.

It plans back from your launch date

Give Bobbin a launch date and it works backward through every style: tech pack done, first sample in, fit approved, bulk fabric in, production start and ex-factory, using the factory's lead time from an accepted quote. You see which steps are already late, the earliest realistic launch for each style, and you can save the dates to the styles in one click. If an approval is holding things up, Bobbin drafts the nudge to whoever owes it.

It turns a fit session into fit comments

After a fitting, give Bobbin your notes the way you'd text them, plus up to three photos of the sample. It writes clear fit comments for the factory (what to change, where and by how much) and proposes changes to your size chart at the base size. Tick the measurements you agree with and the size chart updates; the email to the factory is drafted for you to send.

It checks things before they go out

A few jobs you can ask for any time, and that Bobbin will suggest when they're relevant:

• Tech pack check. Before a tech pack goes to a factory, Bobbin reads it for the gaps a factory will ask about first: no measurements or tolerances, no fabric content or weight, materials without consumption per unit, no construction or packing details, no flats.
• Brief doctor. If a production brief has had no bids after five days, Bobbin suggests what to change (quantity, timeline, location, the description) and can rewrite it with you.
• Quote compare. When several factories have quoted the same style, Bobbin lines them up for your quantity and date: unit cost, total, minimums, when it would be ready, what's expired. It tells you which one it would pick and why, and you can accept it from the same screen.
• Fit notes to revisions. Paste your fit comments the way you'd text them, and Bobbin turns them into revision items on the sampling round.
• Summarize or translate. Paste a long factory email, or pick one Bobbin already filed, and get the short version. You can get it in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi, Turkish, Italian or French.
• Approvals and line sheets. Bobbin shows you which approvals are waiting on a client and which approved styles are missing what a line sheet needs.

It sums up your week

Every Monday there's a short briefing on your dashboard: late samples, samples waiting for your review, open orders and what they're worth, quotes waiting on a decision and approvals you're owed, with three things to do this week.

It answers questions about your own work

Open Bobbin in your dashboard and ask it something in plain English:

• "What should I work on first today?"
• "Which samples are late?"
• "What did the factory say about the hoodie's sleeve length?"
• "Which factories in the directory do knitwear under 300 units?"

Bobbin reads your styles, samples, briefs, quotes, approvals and the factory email it has filed, plus Runsheet's public factory and consultant directories. When there's a next step it can take, it gives you a button instead of a paragraph. It only sees your account's data, never anyone else's. The one thing it will change on request is a sample's status, and only when you ask it to.

Why "drafts, you decide" matters

There's a version of an AI agent that emails your factory on its own. We didn't build that one, on purpose.

Your factory relationships are the most valuable thing in your business. A late sample is rarely just a late sample. Maybe the factory is waiting on your trim approval. Maybe they're closed for a holiday you forgot about. Maybe you agreed to push the date on a call. You know that context; software doesn't. An agent that chases on its own will eventually send the wrong email to the right person, and you'll spend a week repairing it.

So Bobbin does the part that costs you time (noticing, remembering, working out the dates and the numbers, writing the first draft), and you do the part that costs you relationships if it's wrong: deciding whether to send. The dates, prices and totals come from your own data, worked out the same way every time; the AI writes the words around them.

What it costs

Bobbin is in every Runsheet account.

• Free: the starter suggestions, the checks and tools above, 10 questions a month, and 3 approved Bobbin emails a month.
• Pro-Studio ($99 a month, 14 days free): 200 questions a month and unlimited Bobbin emails, alongside the rest of the PLM: tech packs, sampling rounds, costing, line sheets and an email address on every style.

If you're not signed in, you'll still find Bobbin in the corner of the Runsheet site. There it can help you find a factory, start a tech pack, price a product or find an expert.

The same thing, from the other side of the table

If you run a factory: you don't need a login for any of this. Bobbin's follow-ups arrive as a normal email from the brand ("Name via Runsheet"), and when you reply, it goes to the brand. The more clearly you put tracking numbers and ship dates in your replies, the less often you'll be chased. And if you want Bobbin working for you, it comes with Factory Studio: it drafts payment reminders and late-order notes to your brands, reads their emails for order changes, builds recovery plans from your floor counts when an order runs late, prices new requests from styles you've costed, and can set up your whole order history from a spreadsheet. If you want brands to find you in the first place, list your factory.

If you're a consultant or product developer: Bobbin works across every client you run in Runsheet. It flags late samples across all of them, files the factory email on the right client's style, and gives you a first draft of the follow-up you were going to write at 11pm anyway. It also drafts each client's weekly update, turns your unbilled hours into invoice lines, drafts a proposal from a client's brief priced from your own rate, finds factories that fit a brief, and nudges clients about approvals they owe you. List yourself on Runsheet. It's free, and we take no commission.

The short version

1. Bobbin is the AI agent inside Runsheet. It watches your styles, samples and factory email.
2. When a sample goes quiet, it drafts the follow-up. You approve every send.
3. Factory replies file themselves on the right style, update the sample, and turn into order changes you can tick, with your reply drafted.
4. It plans back from your launch date, turns fit notes and photos into fit comments and size-chart changes, and compares quotes with a pick.
5. It checks tech packs, fixes briefs that get no bids, and summarizes or translates factory email.
6. Ask it about your own work in plain English: "What should I work on first today?"
7. It's free to try. Pro-Studio unlocks unlimited Bobbin emails and 200 questions a month.

Start a 14-day Pro-Studio trial, or try the demo to look around a sample workspace first.