DorothyAI

The Problem

Friend of Dorothy is a gay men's supplement brand with a tone that is direct, funny, sex-positive, and community-literate. The product challenge was not simply search. Customers needed to ask questions that mainstream retail tools tend to flatten, block, or misunderstand.

Questions about topping, bottoming, sexual wellness, and queer-specific health needs need careful handling: clear enough to be useful, relaxed enough to match the brand, and bounded enough to stay responsible. A normal e-commerce bot would either avoid the subject or answer with the wrong tone.

The brand needed product discovery that could talk like Friend of Dorothy, understand the catalogue, and help customers make informed choices without making the experience awkward.

The Solution

DorothyAI is a custom conversational product-discovery layer designed around the brand's language, catalogue, and customer context. It delivers:

• Sex-positive conversational AI — built to understand questions about topping, bottoming, sexual wellness, and other queer-specific topics with a tone that feels natural to the brand.
• Contextual product discovery — connects conversational context to Friend of Dorothy's product catalogue, helping users find relevant supplements without relying on blunt keyword matching.
• Custom Shopify Liquid theme — bespoke theme development for friend-of-dorothy.com, integrating DorothyAI cleanly into the shopping experience.
• Shopify GraphQL integration — real-time product data, inventory awareness, and dynamic recommendations powered by Shopify's GraphQL API.
• HCMA-guided development — built using the Human Centred Model Augmentation framework to ensure the AI serves its community with respect, accuracy, and appropriate boundaries.

The Impact

DorothyAI gives Friend of Dorothy a product experience that matches the way the brand actually speaks. Customers can ask sensitive questions in normal language and receive relevant product guidance without being pushed into a sterile retail flow.

The project shows how AI can become part of a brand experience rather than a novelty widget: culturally fluent, commercially useful, and careful with the boundaries of health and wellness advice.