Furmous: your pet was always the main character.

It started out as a dumb idea, and it remains one to this day! One afternoon my kids and I were dropping photos of our cat Dora into an AI image model and asking it to render her in increasingly ridiculous situations — Dora as a computer programmer, Dora cheering on the Canucks. They laughed so hard that I built a little app so they could run the whole loop themselves: upload a photo, pick a situation, and see what comes back.

It was supposed to be a weekend toy, but things started to snowball. I’d been wanting to experiment with Print-On-Demand services like Printify and Printful, so I decided to make the generated output preview on a t-shirt. That idea brought on new challenges, like keying each pet cleanly off its background (Nano Banana 2 can’t do transparent PNGs!), changing the style from photorealistic to more of a line art style, and adding a question about the pet’s pronouns so the renders of female pets and male pets felt different. The prompt itself became this larger, dynamically assembled set of instructions, and I eventually added the ability to send the actual uploaded image alongside the prompt as a reference for the model, again increasing the accuracy of the final render.

To finish it off I added Stripe checkout, gave myself a crash course in t-shirt styles, printing methods, and custom labels, and settled on a catalogue of scenes — NHL playoff moments for my son, and World Cup soccer scenes for my daughter.

I wrote up everything in the full write-up.