Originally published at moday.me. Building MODAY in public.

Why I Started MODAY — The Story of a T-Shirt That Says "I'm So Sorry"

"I'm So Very Sorry" Printed on a T-Shirt, Right There on the Zoom Call

It was the day a client got stranded on a trip because of a typhoon.

It was meeting time. I opened Zoom, and there on the other side of the screen was the client wearing a T-shirt with "I'm So Very Sorry" printed on it in big Japanese characters.

"There's a typhoon, so I'm still away from home," they said with a laugh. "Is it okay if I'm dressed like this today?"

In other words, they were apologizing for joining from a trip location — and the apology was on the T-shirt itself. Before they could say it out loud, the shirt was doing the apologizing.

I laughed. Really laughed. This is good, I thought. The T-shirt instantly connected to their situation and softened the mood. What you wear can tell the story of who you are that day.

Remote Work Makes You Lose Track of Days

A little before that, I'd been feeling something. When you do remote work long enough, the sense of which day it is just fades away.

Tuesday and Wednesday blur together. You think it's Monday when it's actually Thursday night. Friday's relief gets diluted. Monday's heaviness becomes fuzzy.

You look at the calendar. But you don't feel the day of the week in your bones.

Just like that "I'm So Sorry" T-shirt explained that person's day in one line, I thought — what if you could wear the day of the week on your chest? That seemed fun.

Why It Had to Be for Engineers and Geeks

Making a day-of-the-week T-shirt the normal way wouldn't be interesting. A T-shirt that just says "Monday" already exists everywhere.

If it was going to land, I figured it would be with the people who do stupid things with style. The kind of people who can laugh after doing git commit -m "fix typo" three times in a row. The people posting questions on Stack Overflow at 2 AM. Engineers. Geeks.

Day	Print	Color
MONDAY	System Booting...	Black
TUESDAY	Compiling...	Black
WEDNESDAY	Deployed in progress	Black
THURSDAY	Running on caffeine	Black
FRIDAY	Build Successful ✓	Black
SATURDAY	Off the grid	Blue
SUNDAY	Rebooting...	Red

I kept the five weekdays all black, and switched colors just for the weekend. Saturday is blue, Sunday is red. I wanted there to be a small visual shift on those two days when you step away from work.

I Didn't Plan to Start a Brand

I normally do e-commerce consulting. Because of the work, I've been in the trenches of store building and operations for years. Still, I had zero intention of launching my own brand.

Growing other people's brands is fun. But taking the founder seat from zero requires a different kind of resolve. Inventory. Photography. Shipping. Customer service. Taxes. International shipping headaches. The domain of stuff you're holding alone explodes.

And to be honest, this is the first time I'm seriously using Shopify. As a consultant, I've worked more with other e-commerce platforms and just watched Shopify from the outside.

So I flipped all that over and decided to do it myself. That was March and April of this year (2026).

What Claude Code, Shopify, and Gelato Changed

If it had been January or February, I probably wouldn't have started.

Once March hit, I dove into Claude Code. Not just code — operating flows, Webhooks, image generation, translation, file management. I could run everything with it as my copilot. Even while getting my hands dirty with Shopify for the first time, Claude Code filled in the gaps I didn't understand. That was huge.

Shopify making Translate & Adapt free dropped the barrier for a 9-language rollout instantly.

I'd known about Gelato, but when I tested it again, I confirmed that Geo-Routing actually works in practice. Orders get printed and shipped from the facility closest to the customer's country. While sitting in Japan, you can sell to the world from day one.

"One person. Global. Zero inventory. Three months to launch." That moment became real. By mid-March, I was certain we could do it.

It's Not About the Thing — It's About the Experience and Story

A day-of-the-week T-shirt as a product, anyone can make. Send it to China, do a mass run at $3 cost per shirt.

You can't win on that. What MODAY sells is the embodied feeling of one week, baked into the shirt, and the goofball conspiracy between the people wearing it and the people making it.

That's why I'm planning to push the story behind the product way more than the product page itself. This article is the first one.

Reality: I Thought Two Days, But Four or Five Days Aren't Enough

To be straight with you, I was going to blitz the whole thing in two days during Golden Week. Then it'd just be tweaks.

In reality, I'm four or five days of work in right now and still not done. Store configuration, design, translation checks across 9 languages, Gelato product syncing, payment testing, terms of service, special commerce disclosures, shipping policy. It just keeps coming.

The actual development speed feels 3–5x faster thanks to Claude Code. But even that doesn't fit the two-day plan into five days. The distance from "building a store" to "having a store ready to sell" is further than I imagined.

Right now I'm targeting May 18, 2026 for launch. Nine days left. From here on, I just keep checking things off the list in order.

And 5/18 isn't the finish line. The real work starts after we open. Until the first order comes in, until the 9-language localization actually proves itself, until Gelato's Geo-Routing works exactly as planned — it's all still ahead. Building MODAY is only just beginning.

What I'll Write Going Forward

On this blog, I'm going to document everything about getting MODAY off the ground.

• Why I picked the tech stack (that's the next post)
• What I threw at Claude Code vs. what I did myself
• Whether Gelato's Geo-Routing actually works in production
• Where we got stuck on 9-language localization
• The day we got our first order

I'll put it all out there — wins and fails. Not a polished case study, but a record from the trenches.

More to come.

— Yoskee

moday.me