It is perhaps de rigueur in 2026 to hype your product/business by touting the incredible benefits of injecting AI into every nook and cranny, yet the utility is quite difficult to deny. Old chat bots were far more frustrating than facile, and even 12 months ago the state of the art models were 50 percent party trick and 100% exercises in exasperation. Much has changed, more on that in a future post.

I want to share two updates with you today. Both, in our estimation, make Cotton Bureau easier and better to use. That has always been and will continue to be the goal. So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce the new home page and the companion sidebar-dwelling Bureau Bot. May each find favor in your estimation.

A New Home (Page)

If you’re into t-shirts — and we can only assume you are if you are reading this — finding the perfect shirt on Cotton Bureau just got 1000% easier.

The previous version of the home page was nice, but the purpose was a bit muddled. Was it for people who came to Cotton Bureau to shop, or people who came to Cotton Bureau to sell? When it was initially designed and built, we decided to speak mostly to people who might want to create shirts rather than buy shirts. After all, if you want to shop, just go to the Shop page? It was fine and good and we liked it.

But. One day we had an idea. What if we could make searching for your next favorite tee on Cotton Bureau not just a little bit better but like way, way better? Like, you know, if you told us you liked giraffes and we could instantly show you t-shirts with giraffes, whether or not the designer included “giraffe” in the shirt title or the description. And then you could ask to see them only on white or maybe as sweatshirts. That would be pretty great, and, it turns out, we can.

The Cotton Bureau home page is now a whole lot smarter. Find designs that ship in time for upcoming holidays (ahem, Thanksgiving), shirts for family and friends, or something completely unexpected, just by typing.

We’ve been using the new home page ourselves for a few weeks, and the novelty hasn’t worn off. There are tens of thousands of amazing shirts and now they’re all at your fingertips.

Oh, and we made it so much faster and easier to add shirts to your cart or save them for later. One click to save, one click to add. Honestly, it might be dangerous.

Bureau Bot

The secret sauce enabling the new home page (and more) is a faceless, incorporeal assistant we call Bureau Bot. He’s not cute or droll or anthropomorphized in any way. He’s just… functional and… available 24/7 and… shockingly useful.

If the home page is like having a Cotton Bureau employee as your personal shopping concierge, Bureau Bot is the equivalent for everything else. He stays out of the way until you need him, a handy bot-ler, tucked away in a drawer. When you’re ready, invoke Bureau Bot by clicking/tapping the chat sparkle in the bottom right. Once summoned, you can ask pretty much anything you can think of and get a helpful answer.

Do you have discounts? Yep. Sure do. Here’s more about that. What size would be good for me? Well, what size do you usually wear? How about we take some measurements? Do you offer returns? It depends! What product are you looking at. Can you tell me more about this page? Help me create my own store? Look up my most recent order? Yes, yes, yes. The answer is (almost always) yes.

We pride ourselves on answering customer service emails personally and quickly, but even we need to sleep. Bureau Bot doesn’t. His answers are faster and better and have more context. We’re still around to answer the especially tricky questions, of course. Take Bureau Bot for a spin next time you’re on the site and tell us what you think. (You can just reply to this email if you want. He doesn’t know about emails.) Maybe we’re biased, but it’s hard to imagine going back to a world before Bureau Bot. He’s that good.

Pro Tip: If you have a Cotton Bureau account, your chat history is automatically saved. Each thread is unique, so have one for shirts you’re eyeing up for your mother-in-law, one for tees you want to get yourself, and another for any customer service questions you might have. Plus, save your regular size, favorite shirt colors, or anything else you can think of to Bureau Bot’s memory so he never forgets. (Unless you want him to! Easily delete old chats and erase memories at any time.)

It is not an exaggeration to say we have 6+ months of updates that have been quietly shipped that we’re just chomping at the bit to announce. But we want to give the new home page and Bureau Bot some space to breathe, so we’re going to pause here.

Go to the home page right now, play around, then tell us what you think. We truly want to know. We’re aware of some glitches and hiccups that are in the priority queue to get cleaned up, so if you run into anything odd, just know we’re still working on it.

Email us@cottonbureau.com. We’ll read it and reply, promise.

I couldn’t be happier to introduce Dave Pell, owner and operator of NextDraft. Dave’s been using Cotton Bureau almost since the beginning to get his readers the highest quality tees and raise a little money for charity at the same time. Please enjoy our brief chat on writing, AI, t-shirts, and gambling.

Dave! I often find myself beginning these conversations by looking back and marveling at how long it’s been since we started working together. In your case, our little business relationship is now entering it’s second decade, which I have to say is pretty good. Let’s start by just establishing what you do and, maybe more importantly, why you do it.

You read the news, condense it, and add your thoughts. And you’ve been doing it a long time. Is that right? Your bio says “I Am the Algorithm”, which is pithy, but with AI going from fantasy to if not ubiquitous perhaps ubiquity-adjacent have you seen any evolution in your particular approach to the newsletter?

I used to type up my thoughts and updates from life into 30-40 page documents, before printing out and binding copies of the material, which I’d then snailmail to my friends. So I was basically blogging before the web. Writing has always been my main passion, so I couldn’t have been more excited to see the creative expression possibilities offered by the early internet. (I’m guessing my friends who received my 30-40 page printed missives were pretty happy I had a new outlet as well.) I basically used various internet tools and strategies to combine my core skills, interests, and addictions into a single product.

I like to think of NextDraft as a modern-day column; it’s essentially a personality-driven look at the day’s most fascinating news. It probably says more about me than the technology that I haven’t changed my approach or the tools I use to deliver NextDraft, even as AI has swept across our screens. I use about 75 Safari open tabs to find the stories I want to feature, I write up the content (including html tags) in BBEdit, and I publish NextDraft as a blog, an app, and most importantly, a newsletter. The tagline “I am the algorithm” was originally aimed at making a clear contrast between my human- driven and written content and the garbage being force-fed into our social media feeds. With the emergence of AI, that contrast between human and machine creations has only become more crucial. In the early days of NextDraft, I’d occasionally get complaints of bias from readers. I’d always respond that yes, of course, my content is biased. It’s a personality-centric endeavor. I mean, my head is the logo...

Thirty to 40 printed pages! I thought I liked to write and annoy my friends. That’s truly incredible.

It sounds like the plan then is to keep going, like John Henry against the steam drill? I wouldn’t expect anything less. In my imagination, the Dave Pell head logo is channeling its inner William F. Buckley. NextDraft will continue to exist, standing athwart the AI onslaught yelling “Stop!” Or, perhaps at least surveying and ridiculing our self-inflicted slopfest from an appropriate vantage.

I probably had that much output daily back when Twitter was good.

I’m not sure which metaphor is farther from my reality, the physical strength associated with John Henry or the politics of William F Buckley. But yes, NextDraft will continue to go on, partly because I don’t want to give up the good fight during these dark and deeply troubled times in America, and partly because I am addicted to two things: The news and having my writing be read. So even if they want me out, I keep pulling myself back in.

I don’t think there’s any stopping the AI onslaught, but I hope there’s still room for human-created and curated content. I have a feeling the human stuff will be even more highly valued. But that’s probably just my Humanities degree talking.

I make no apologies for my references. Your output and resilience in the face of technology is admirable regardless. We’ll just have to hope you can avoid their fates.

Being on the internet means never having to say you’re sorry.

I also appreciate that you self-identify as a columnist. As someone who would read the Sunday paper cover to cover and carried a pre-cellular Palm Pilot to school just to have enough news to keep myself entertained, I have many fond memories of reading those men and women who owned their inches week after week after week.

Do you see any particular writers’ fingerprints on your newsletter? I’m curious who and what has influenced you most over the years.

In a lot of ways, I patterned my modern-day column after the style of SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. His focus was local and much more gossipy, but he created what’s known as three-dot journalism. He would have short blurbs on different topics, each separated on the page by three dots. I follow essentially the same model by sharing the top stories of the day, covering a variety of different subjects that can run the gamut from deadly serious to drop-dead funny. Caen also inserted a lot of personality and pithy humor into his column, and I try to do the same. I always laugh when readers accuse me of being opinionated or biased. Of course I am. It’s my column. I mean, come on, my head is the logo.

You’re a published author in addition to being a prolific poster. I’m fairly agnostic myself when choosing between the Declines and Falls of the world and the well-aimed bon mot, but there’s no denying the pace of change and patience of the reader have combined to favor speed and economy of words.

Do you lean one way or the other? Our current frenetic pace seems to suit you well, but maybe you harbor a hidden affection for monthly magazines or other, calmer fora of years and decades past.

I’ve been tweaking on internet news and social media feeds for so long that, at this point, I’m pretty sure I write better distracted. But when it comes to reading, I prefer the longer form features. In terms of books, there was a time when I read nothing but nonfiction. But, like many of us, the nonfiction being served up by the world these days gives me more than I can take, so when the lights (other than the dim one from my Kindle) go out, I always reach for a novel. At this point, I find fiction is more realistic than reality.

Oh, that’s fascinating. I was familiar with the three-dot style but not the provenance.

I’m a sucker for a good name, and NextDraft is pretty solid. How did you end up choosing that as the masthead?

There’s a familiar adage that journalism is the first rough draft of history. I provide a quick and timely overview of the journalism of the day, hence, my newsletter is the … NextDraft.

It was mentioned at the outset, but we’ve been working together for years now to make NextDraft merch available to your astute readers. What does your process look like for that, and what makes you interested in offering t-shirts, hats, etc. at all?

The combination of loving my logo, a healthy ego, and  digging the process of making, wearing, and seeing NextDraft merch in the wild is what drives me to put the shirts, etc, out there.

I’m also a massive fan of Cotton Bureau, where I essentially get my entire wardrobe. It’s so great to combine the creativity of makers with a indie brand determined to sell quality products.

To design the shirts, I work with my longtime designer/collaborator Bryan Bell, who is a great designer and person, aside from being a Dodgers fan.

Last one, and I don’t even know what made me want to ask other than that it’s been on my mind a lot the past year or so: do you have any thoughts on prediction markets, betting apps, and gambling in general? It’s a polarizing topic, but I find myself usually in the boring middle seeing both value and harm.

Let’s see if I can move you away from that middle position. Prediction app makers knowingly and aggressively combine the most addictive elements of gambling, social media, and gamification and then target young people (especially males) who were already in the midst of a gambling epidemic brought on by sports betting apps.

Unlike social media companies, which started out with at least a few positive goals, and only later embraced the elements that would fray society, foment divisions, and challenge democracy, the prediction markets have been built from the outset to capitalize on their most negative elements. And these companies are well aware of their target market, as they often do things like sponsoring pizza parties at fraternities. And all of this is done under the ridiculous guise that prediction apps are somehow something other than gambling apps, a preposterous notion that survives government intrusion because Don Jr and others are investors in the companies.

Of course, investors aren’t the only ones being separated from their ethics by the promise of big returns. Sports leagues and media companies that once shunned gambling like a plague are now firmly in favor of partnering with these companies. Meanwhile, revenue-desperate media companies are pretending that these markets represent some new-fangled form of news and politcal coverage- because, really, what do we need more than to make our political coverage even more similar to the coverage of a horse race? I don’t participate in prediction markets, but if I did, I’d wager that we’ll be sorry we were so willing to go all in on this garbage.

Dave, it’s been a pleasure, as always. Thanks for making some time to put even more words on the internet, and thank you for working with us all these years.

Next up in our series of conversations with some of our favorite companies on Cotton Bureau, we’re talking to Neven Mrgan of Panic about his experience designing, publishing, and, of course, merchandising indie video games.

Hey, Neven. I have to say, I’m looking forward to this conversation. I’ve long admired the wide range of your personal and professional accomplishments. Before we get into how Playdate and Cotton Bureau have been working together on video game merch, could you give everyone a little bit of background on how you ended up as both indie “designer, game maker, and writer” and how that experience has translated into your day-to-day responsibilities at Panic?

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a designer. Somehow, it worked out for me in the long run—I’ve worked in design for the past twenty years. In my lifetime, that has meant largely digital design, which videogames are a pure and extreme expression of. I loved making little interactive experiences on the web in the 2000s: single-serving sites, tech demos, zines. And as someone with fond memories of games played on the C64, Amiga, and NES, I had that standard late-90s dream of being a videogame designer. It felt totally out of reach, however—until the App Store introduced a new platform for games in 2008. Since everyone was new to this, it felt less intimidating to me, and I got to work on early iPhone games with my friend Matt Comi.

And as for writing, you’re looking at a classic book-readin’ nerd here, the kid who spent the summer break walking to the library every day. Writing feels like an extension of reading to me, and reading is something I do all the time as a form of mental hygiene. If I’m not currently reading two books, I get itchy.

At Panic, I’m currently the Creative Lead (and still a Designer at heart.) We’re a small company doing things entirely too big for our pants-size: coding developer apps, sure, but also publishing videogames, and making our own handheld gaming console. I get to work on the design of all of this: app UI, marketing websites, trade show booths, hardware, games themselves. Every day is a wacky casserole of nearly random ingredients… and I like it that way.

So, on the topic of Panic and tackling some pretty big projects, can you go into a little detail about how the game publishing part of the company got started? You all aren’t shy about telling this story, but it’s still fascinating. How did you go from a pretty straightforward Mac software business to  supporting developers who make video games and, eventually, building your own handheld console?

We’ve always been flexible, and we’ve always been into videogames. Back in the 2000s, we had the goofy idea of being the US seller of official shirts for the game Katamari Damacy—and it was a lot of fun! It seemed like somehow, we could turn that into proper game involvement…

But this didn’t happen until 2013 or so, when our longtime friend Jake (creator of custom “faces” for our Audion music player, many years prior to this!) co-founded a game studio called Campo Santo to make the game Firewatch. We thought we could maybe help with publishing, a task that was notoriously annoying for mid-size game teams at the time; we were told the terms offered were usually not… amazing. So we offered hopefully better ones. And it went well for everyone, it seems!

We assumed this episode was a one-off, but then one day we found ourselves chuckling at GIFs of this goose-based game we’d seen online, and maybe… just maybe… we could publish that one, too? This got the ball rolling, so pretty soon we had an actual Publishing Team. Ten years after Firewatch, we’ve signed about a dozen lovely videogames, including the Yorkshire comedy slapformer Thank Goodness You’re Here!, the intergalactic TV signal Blippo+, and the Ecuadorean soccer-memory despelote. Games are now a major part of our business; a really fun and rewarding one.

The story of Playdate, our handheld game console—a fairly mad thing for a small company with no experience in hardware to be making—is even less intentional. Basically, in the 2010s we wanted to make a cool little gift for our friends and business partners, to mark our 20th anniversary. (Yes, Panic has been around for that long—we’re older than Facebook or Google!) It began as a clock with a cool e-ink-like screen, and we thought it would be cool if the clock face changed unexpectedly, as a little surprise. Once we had it running, we kept writing software for it, including little games, until it occurred to us one day that we had accidentally made a Game Boy of our own.

Taking the project seriously at this point, we contacted our friends at Teenage Engineering, an amazing Swedish company, to help us construct and manufacture it. They provided design input and shared their vast factory/logistics knowledge. Pretty soon, we had a manufacturing line in Malaysia, a custom OS and SDK, and a list of developers we’d secretly shared this dream with, eager to make something all-new for it. Against all odds, it all just came together: a handheld gaming console unlike any other, with a 1-bit screen, a crank, and its own game ecosystem. Twenty-four surprise games delivered weekly, an on-device game store, a constant stream of wonderful new titles.

Had someone told us at the start we’d need to build and do all of this, we would’ve said “well no thank you then” very quickly. Luckily, we had no idea how much work it would all be.

I love this story on so many levels, from the t-shirt origin story to the very real sense of “oh no how did we find ourselves here and what are we going to do about it?” that is so familiar to anyone running a business.

Of course I can’t resist the perfect segue you provided: with Panic’s experience partnering with Katamari Damacy to retail official game merch, you’re obviously familiar with how physical goods intersect with virtual experiences — I would say, “the role merch can play in enhancing the video game experience and elevating the brand”, but why use jargon to describe what is really just designers having fun with t-shirts and other novelties that fans might appreciate?

Can you talk a little about some of the things you have made in the past to support your games and what the last few years have been like as we have been able to work together on Playdate goods and apparel?

My favorite way of approaching merchandise for videogames is thinking of in-world items that would exist inside the game itself. For Firewatch, we made a set of notebooks styled after the pulp paperback novels in the tower, and posters that were meant to be part of a government PSA campaign about forest fires.

For Untitled Goose Game, the team wanted to have a number of artists they like reinterpret the game through their own art styles—another strategy I’m a fan of. Personally I’m not too precious about the specifics of being on-model and brand-accurate, as long as something of the spirit of the game is captured earnestly in the art. Once a thing is out in the world, it sort of belongs to those who love it.

I’d like to do a wacky, novelty item for every game, but at the end of the day, people wear clothing and put stickers on things, so we end up making a lot of those. For Playdate, I decided to lean into fan service and give the diehards what they want: logo shirts, popular games. But we snuck in some deep cuts, like a reference to our ancient “hi, I make Macintosh software” and the mascot of our developer documentation, named Crankles by the community.

When we put together Season Two of Playdate games, I worked with each dev team to make products on Cotton Bureau for their game. There’s a variety of approaches there, from using the game’s own pixel art, to beautiful, elaborate illustrations.

I’m glad we could make something physical for every title. Cotton Bureau have been an ideal partner for our Playdate merch: easy to work with, making high-quality products, and making us look good in the process. It would take us aeons to figure out everything you do, so this way we can just focus on the creative work, and let the pros handle the logistics.

Well shucks, that is awfully nice of you to say. It’s a privilege for us to work together. And I couldn’t agree more, while there is always a strong appetite for logo tees, the quirkier items are usually my favorites, like the Root Bear Perfect Pour pint glass. Or, from your earlier games, the Firewatch posters from Olly. I love everything NPS, so they were right in my wheelhouse.

Thank you so much as always for your time, Neven. What a fun way for us to continue this new series of conversations with some of our favorite companies and communities. Good luck with Season 3!