We understand your world first, and the technology second.
That order matters. It is the whole reason this works. A small, senior team that does the valuable thing most AI companies skip: understand your business, tell you plainly where AI can help, and then actually make it work.
Why we exist
Most business owners are getting one of two things when it comes to AI: breathless hype, or overcomplicated solutions. Both leave you stuck. New Shirt exists to do the valuable thing in between — understand your business, tell you plainly where AI can help, and then actually make it work.
The throughline is simple. Clarity over spin, and evidence over optimism. We'd rather tell you the honest, smaller answer than sell you the exciting, wrong one.
Small on purpose.
A strategist who has spent a career inside real companies, paired with a veteran engineer who builds what the plan calls for. You will not be handed to a junior staffer learning on your dime. The person who understands your business is the person looking after your work.
John Schimpf is the founder of New Shirt and a marketing, operations, and technology expert who has spent his career where knowing what a business needs matters as much as knowing how to build it.
He is also the founder of New Shirt Agency, a data-led marketing company that advises clients on digital advertising, technical marketing systems, and social media management and strategy. He knows this work from the inside out, from the data underneath a campaign to the strategy on top.
That expertise is backed by years in the operations seat. John has served as Chief Marketing Officer and a senior operations advisor for multiple IT companies, helping guide both their growth and how they ran day to day, and he has built and managed customer service systems and developed offshore teams. Few people move as comfortably across marketing, operations, and technology at once, which is exactly what New Shirt is built on: he reads a business from the inside, then works out where technology genuinely fits.
He also developed 25th Street Recording into a globally recognized multimedia production facility with advanced technical systems, building the team and architecting its technical infrastructure. The studio works with top media, technology, and lifestyle brands.
Today John brings that systems-first, people-first approach to helping businesses put AI to work.
Roger Rohrbach leads New Shirt's engineering. He has spent his career on the frontier of software engineering, as both a developer who writes the hard parts himself and a leader who can carry a team through them.
His work has ranged across some of the most demanding corners of the field. He has contributed to popular database and operating systems, the kind of foundational software other software is built on. He has engineered for feature film productions, built factory automation systems where the code has to be right the first time, and worked on media platforms at scale. Few engineers have worked credibly across that many different kinds of system.
That range is matched by the level he has operated at. He has consulted for Fortune 500 companies, built and led the engineering teams behind several startups, and headed the engineering effort for a $2.2B business. He knows both how to ship a first version and how to keep a serious system running once real money depends on it.
At New Shirt, Roger leads the build. Where John works out what to build and why, Roger and his team build it.
Real systems for real businesses.
A few examples of the work, described plainly.
A unified customer database, and a sales engine to match
A touring artist's family of brands had valuable customer data scattered across disconnected places, with no single view and no way to act on it. We used AI to pull it into one clean database, then used that to pinpoint their best sales targets. We didn't stop at the data: we built the sales infrastructure around it, set up the pipeline software, and trained their team to run it.
A sharp research tool for a field buried in documents
Searching state legislation by hand is slow, tedious work, and the people who do it daily deserve a better tool than what is out there. So we built one: custom software that helps a team stay on top of California legislation and policy. It is exactly the kind of bespoke tool that used to cost a fortune and, today, does not.
Brand-smart AI that sounds like you
Beyond databases and dashboards, we build the everyday tools: AI trained on a brand's own voice and knowledge so a whole team can use it without sounding generic, and reporting that surfaces what matters instead of burying it.
How we work
We tell you straight — including when the answer is "you don't need much."
The honest, smaller answer beats the exciting, wrong one every time.
Built to run.
We ship things that keep working, not demos that stall after the meeting.
Plain language, always.
If you can't understand it, we haven't done our job.
Your business first.
The technology serves it, never the other way around.
Let's talk about your business.
No pitches. No pressure. Just a real conversation about where you are and whether AI can help.
Start a conversation