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The Founder
Built by a Supply Chain Operator Who Finally Chose His Own Route
Most mornings, I'm at my desk by 7am. My desk is a folding table inside a deer blind on a 2,000-acre piece of West Texas desert, about 30 miles outside of Dryden. My dogs are outside. Starlink is up. There are deer 40 yards out that couldn't care less that I'm running a forecasting automation for a billion-dollar supply chain. That's where Bart's Tees came from — not a boardroom, not a pitch deck, not a product agency. A deer blind with Starlink internet and 13 years of supply chain frustration finally looking for an exit ramp.
That's not a metaphor. The photo above was taken at that desk. The code on the screen is real. The buck on the tablet showed up an hour later.
The Operator Behind the Brand
My name is Kyle Bartlett. Everyone who matters calls me Bart — it's been that way since small-town Indiana youth sports, and I stopped fighting it a long time ago.
I'm a Purdue engineering graduate who spent 13 years inside the supply chain machine. I started at Sears in Chicago as an inventory analyst, moved through demand planning, supply planning, and eventually managed inventory across five programs before the company collapsed. From there I moved to Belk as a demand and financial planner, then relocated to Austin in 2019 to join Apple — arriving three months before COVID shut everything down.
At Apple I spent five years on the iPad team. I worked every product line — iPad Pro 13-inch, Pro 11-inch, Air, Mini, and the 9th-gen legacy model — and was part of two launch teams. I managed in supply chain leadership before deciding, after five years, that I was done choosing my employer's office over my own life.
I left for Anker, where I became demand manager for the charging division, managing our largest retail accounts: Walmart, Costco, Verizon, and others. And that's where something shifted.
How a Phrase Became a Brand
When I joined Anker's charging team in 2024, I inherited a process that made Sears circa 2010 look automated. Fifty to sixty tabs of data. Copied and pasted by hand, every single day, to generate a single report. At a tech company. In 2024.
I'd already been teaching myself AI tools on nights and weekends since late 2024 — staying up late, running YouTube in the background on every lunch break, learning what coding models could do before most people at my level had even heard of them. I started writing Apps Scripts with AI assistance to automate the reports. Then the forecasting files. Then the PSI reports. Then the week-over-week forecast commentary that my team had been manually compiling for years.
When my manager left and our teams merged with China, it turned out the China-side team had been building automation tools in secret while we were doing everything by hand. I'd been building the same things alone, from a desk in Houston, without permission or budget, just because I could see what was coming.
That phrase isn't just a tagline I thought was clever. It's a belief I arrived at the hard way, through a decade of watching smart people drown in spreadsheets when they didn't have to. It's the reason I'm now stepping into an AI Director role, building a full SaaS forecasting and intelligence platform for the team I used to sit next to.
And it's the exact belief that Bart's Tees is built on.
“Manual Work Is a Bug.”
The belief Bart's Tees is built on
The Route I Actually Chose
Here's the part that doesn't fit neatly on a LinkedIn profile.
I grew up country. Small town. Guns, four-wheelers, hunting, fishing — that was just life. When my family moved to Texas, my dad and I bought a 2,000-acre piece of desert in West Texas, outside a town called Pumpville, near Sanderson and Dryden. We have deer blinds, Gators, ATVs, and a small cabin and RV set up out there. I go as often as I can.
My brother moved to Marathon, Florida years ago and became a serious fisherman. Now we're both serious fishermen. He's got a big boat and a Starlink Boat Edition, and we fish the Florida Keys together when I can get out there. I've answered work emails from the middle of the Gulf of Mexico with a deep-sea rod in my left hand.
I don't say any of this to brag. I say it because it's the honest answer to why this brand exists.
I looked around for apparel that represented both sides of who I am — the operator who automates everything so he can be somewhere else, and the outdoorsman who actually shows up to be somewhere else — and I couldn't find it. Nobody was making that thing. So I started making it.
What Bart's Tees Is Building
Bart's Tees is outdoor apparel for people who build systems so they can go live their lives.
It's for the developer who automated their pipeline so they could catch a sunset from a summit. The analyst who built the dashboards so Friday afternoon is theirs. The operator who closed the laptop at 2pm on a Wednesday because the work was already done — by something they built.
It's not tech merch with a mountain on it. It's not hunting camo with a keyboard joke. It's the brand that exists at the actual intersection — where the operators who genuinely love the outdoors have been waiting, with no one to serve them.
Wilderness
Where I work most mornings.
Shop Wilderness →Desert
The land outside Dryden.
Shop Desert →Ocean
The Keys, my brother's boat, and the idea that the best office is the one that moves.
Shop Ocean →We're starting with apparel. We're not stopping there.
If you're the kind of person who automates your workday so you can spend the afternoon watching deer from a blind in West Texas — welcome. You found your brand.