It started with watching my wife spend her evenings on data entry.
She opened a women's boutique in the Spring of 2025. It didn't take long for her dream of owning her own store, curating the latest fashion, and building customer relationships to collide with the operational realities of running a small boutique business — and just like that the back office took over!
After her first buying trip, she came home with 50+ purchase orders from different wholesale vendors. Each one had to be manually typed into the Point of Sale system. Product by product. Size by size. SKU by SKU. That was 30 hours of data entry — minimum — time that could have been spent on the floor with customers, training her team, or even spending time with her family.
And that was just the beginning.
The Invisible Work of Running a Boutique
Every boutique owner knows this reality:
- New inventory arrives. Someone has to find product photos, write descriptions, and get everything on the website. That's another 10-15 hours a month.
- Inventory decisions need to be made. What's selling? What's dead? What should we reorder? What should we mark down? That's hours of staring at spreadsheets.
- Customers drift away. Life gets busy. They forget to come back. Meanwhile, you're too busy with everything else to reach out.
The irony is brutal: the work that keeps you from your customers is the work of trying to serve your customers.
I'm a Tech Person. I Had to Do Something.
Here's the thing — I'm not a retail person. I'm a self-described tech geek who's wife happened to open a boutique. I've spent years building software and automating systems.
So when I saw my wife drowning in busywork, I did what any obsessive problem-solver would do: I started building tools to fix it.
First came MyMarketOrders. Upload a wholesale order from Joor, NuOrder, or Faire, and it imports directly into your POS. Those 30+ hours of post-market data entry? Now it takes minutes.
Then came RetailAdvisor. An AI-powered analytics platform that tells you exactly what's working and what's not. Brand performance scoring. Dead stock alerts. Even an AI chat that knows your inventory and can answer questions like "What's killing my cash flow?" or "Should I reorder this brand?"
Then came BoutiqueSEO. Because what's the point of a beautiful website if no one can find it? Weekly scans, plain-English recommendations, and Google Search Console integration.
But I Realized Something Bigger
These tools are useful. They're saving boutique owners real time. But they're still just tools.
What boutique owners really need isn't another dashboard to check or another system to learn. They need someone to do the work.
That's when the vision for BoutiqueOS crystallized:
What if your store had employees that never sleep?
Imagine: a shipment arrives at your store. By the time you've unpacked the box, everything is already on your website. Product photos found automatically. Descriptions written. Your VIP customers already notified about new arrivals that match their taste.
No manual work. No hunting for photos. No writing descriptions at 10pm when you should be with your family.
The AI just... does it.
That's What We're Building
BoutiqueOS is the operating system for boutique retail.
Today, it's a suite of powerful tools. But we're building toward something bigger: AI agents that handle the back office while you do what you actually love.
I'm building this in public because I believe in transparency. You'll see the wins. You'll see the struggles. You'll see features ship and sometimes break.
But most importantly, you'll see something being built by someone who lives this reality every day. Who eats dinner next to a woman checking her inventory app. Who understands that every hour saved on busywork is an hour that can be spent on what actually matters.
Follow Along
If you're a boutique owner who's tired of the back office eating your life, I'd love for you to follow this journey.
If you're just curious about what it takes to build software for an industry you might never have thought about, welcome aboard.
And if you have ideas, frustrations, or problems you wish someone would solve — reach out. The best features come from real conversations with real people.
Let's build something that gives boutique owners their time back.
— Kevin Burke
Founder, BoutiqueOS
