Case study · Marine & fishing retail · Shopify
99% of calls answered.Now the AI voice agent closes the sale.
“This has boosted our profits by at least 25% and is only growing from there.”
The Harbour Chandler — a leading marine and fishing retailer shipping across Canada and the US — went from answering ~52% of calls to 99% with Brainova's AI voice agents. Fisher, the AI agent that closes sales by text, is live today.
The story, in five lines
Aug 2025 – Jul 2026 · Updated- Brainova Talk answered 99% of The Harbour Chandler's 6,443 calls from August 2025 to July 2026 — up from ~52%, when callers waited ~25 seconds on the line.
- Brainova's AI agents booked 2,287 callbacks and answered 4,595 customer questions for The Harbour Chandler in their first nine months.
- Brainova AI Inventory took The Harbour Chandler's Shopify publishing from ~90 listings a week to hundreds a day.
- The Harbour Chandler's profits rose at least 25%, by CEO Matt Price's own count.
- Fisher, Brainova's AI sales agent, is live at The Harbour Chandler — texting checkout links mid-call.
The voyage so far
From first call to closed sales
Brainova Talk goes live (Phase 1)
Curtis and James — the AI voice agents — start answering the calls staff couldn't reach.
Nine months of results
The nine-month numbers land — the results that put Phase 2 on the table.
Phase 2 signed
Matt signs the expansion that green-lights a sales-closing agent.
Fisher goes live
A sales agent that closes orders inside the call — working with real customers today.
- Next
The next agent is already charted
A fishing-advice agent is in development — The Harbour Chandler's senior-rep expertise, on the phone and on harbourchandler.ca.
The setup
A 1986 shop with a 2026 problem
The Harbour Chandler has sold marine and fishing gear from the Nanaimo waterfront since 1986 — regulars at the counter, fishermen on the phone, and a Shopify storefront shipping across Canada and the US. By 2025, growth had outrun the team, and two bottlenecks were costing money every day.
- Team
- 30+
- Inventory
- 30,000+ items
- Using
- Brainova Talk · AI Inventory · Fisher
Bottleneck 01 · The phones
Nearly half
of calls never answered — a ~52% answer rate
Those who did get through waited ~25 seconds on the line. During peak hours, staff were with in-person customers; after hours, nobody answered at all. In marine retail, a missed call is a customer dialing the next shop.
Bottleneck 02 · The catalog
20–60 min
to list one product on Shopify
Images, dimensions, weight, tags, SEO — hunted down by hand for every SKU. The team managed about 90 listings a week against 30,000+ items in inventory. The backlog only grew.
Honest answer: we were behind. Fishermen would call about a part, hit voicemail, and buy from someone else. Meanwhile my team spent whole days typing vendor data into Shopify. We knew both had to change.
Leg 01 · Voice · live Aug 2025
The phone gets answered. Day or night.
In August 2025, Brainova Talk went live on The Harbour Chandler's existing lines — no PBX migration, no new hardware. Two AI voice agents, Curtis and James, pick up the moment a call would roll past a busy counter, and stay on duty after the doors close. They take the caller's information, understand what they need, and book callbacks straight into The Harbour Chandler's calendar.
Every call is categorized — Parts, Electronics, Fishing, Website — and lands in that department's Microsoft Teams channel with the caller's name, number, and intent. Recorded, transcribed, searchable.
Full results table
| Metric | Before | After | Change | Timeframe | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Calls answered (overflow + main line, peak-hour + after-hours) | ~52% · ~25s avg wait | 99% | +47 pts | Aug 2025 – Jul 2026 | Brainova Talk dashboard · 2026-07-06 |
Calls handled by AI agent | 0 | 6,443 | cumulative | Aug 2025 – Jul 2026 | Brainova Talk dashboard · 2026-07-06 |
Messages exchanged across AI conversations | 0 | 42,445 | ~6.6 per call | Aug 2025 – Jul 2026 | Brainova Talk dashboard · 2026-07-06 |
Total AI call duration (work performed by Brainova Talk) | 0 | 93h 34min | cumulative | Aug 2025 – Jul 2026 | Brainova Talk dashboard · 2026-07-06 |
Callbacks booked by AI agent | 0 | 2,287 | ~55% of the 4,159 calls in that window | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 (first 9 months) | Brainova Talk dashboard · HC stats file 2026-05-05 |
Customer questions answered by AI agent | 0 | 4,595 | cumulative | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 (first 9 months) | Brainova Talk dashboard · HC stats file 2026-05-05 |
Hours / week saved on the front desk (ops time freed up) | 0 | ~18 hrs | +18 hrs/week | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 (first 9 months) | HC ops log |
We went from missing nearly half our calls to answering 99% of them. Peak hours, after hours, doesn't matter. The phone just gets picked up now.
Leg 02 · Catalog · live Aug 2025
From 90 listings a week to hundreds a day
Brainova AI Inventory takes a raw vendor SKU from The Harbour Chandler's suppliers and builds the complete Shopify listing (a team of specialized AI agents researching images, dimensions, classification, and SEO in parallel), then holds it in Pending Review for a human check. One click syncs it to the storefront. Nothing goes live unchecked, and nothing gets there by hand.
SIMMS Men's Challenger Jacket — Bay Leaf
SKU SIMS-13675-1146-40 · Active on Shopify
Tap the screenshot to view it full size
- 9 product images
- 3 size variants
- weight 1.95 lb
- dimensions
- 5 tags
- collections
- SEO title + meta
- barcode
A real SKU from the pipeline — every field on this listing was produced by AI, checked by a human, and synced to Shopify with one click. The same pipeline runs against every SKU in the catalog.
Full results table
| Metric | Before | After | Change | Timeframe | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Listings published throughput | ~90 / week | Hundreds / day | weekly → daily | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 | Brainova pipeline log · HC stats file 2026-05-05 |
Hours / week on manual product research | 26 hrs | 4 hrs | −85% | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 | HC ops log |
Time-to-list a new product on Shopify (median) | 20–60 min | Under 3 min | ~7–20× faster | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 | HC ops log |
Pipeline success rate (SKUs enriched + published without manual intervention) | — | Over 85% | — | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 | Brainova pipeline log · HC stats file 2026-05-05 |
SKUs published with complete metadata (image · dimensions · weight · tags · collections · SEO meta) | ~30% | 99% | +69 pts | Aug 2025 – Apr 2026 | Brainova pipeline log |
Every SKU needs an image, dimensions, and a weight — in marine retail you can't quote freight without them. The pipeline gets all three right. We used to manage about ninety listings a week — now we can do more than that in a day.
Leg 03 · Phase 2
Live · Jun 2026Meet Fisher — the agent that closes the sale
Nine months of results earned the Phase 2 signature on April 30, 2026. Then in June, Fisher went live — a sales agent, not an intake agent. Real customers are ordering through it today, while Curtis and James keep handling intake and callbacks exactly as before.
How does Fisher close a sale on the phone?
01
The call comes in
A customer asks about a rod, a prop, a jacket. Fisher picks up, asks the right questions, and pins down what they need.
02
Live stock & price check
Fisher queries The Harbour Chandler's Shopify catalog mid-call — real availability, real pricing.
03
Checkout, texted
Fisher texts product cards with a checkout link. The customer orders right from their phone — before hanging up.
Our new agent Fisher closes sales on the phone now. It checks live stock and pricing against our Shopify catalog mid-call and texts the customer a link to buy right from their phone. No callback, no phone tag — the order's placed before the call ends.
Next on the chart:a fishing-advice agent bringing The Harbour Chandler's senior-rep expertise to the phone — and to harbourchandler.ca.
One catalog feeds both sides
Brainova AI Inventory and Brainova Talk — including Fisher — run on the same Shopify catalog. AI Inventory keeps every record clean: real images, real weights and prices. Fisher reads that same catalog mid-call to confirm stock and quote pricing. The cleaner the catalog, the better every call. A single-purpose voice vendor or Shopify app only ever sees one side of that loop — Brainova runs both.
The same system works as an AI receptionist for retail stores and an AI voice agent for Shopify stores.
The crew
What the crew says
“I don't want my competitors to have access to these tools that will help them catch up.”
There are over thirty thousand items in our inventory, and only a fraction of them were ever on the website. Brainova AI Inventory is how we're closing that gap — getting everything in the warehouse online. We're not there yet, but it's finally within reach. It's a game changer.
Meta fields, SEO tags, and optimized product descriptions are what get products found — and what drive online sales. AI agents now handle all of it automatically, ensuring every product is optimized without adding to our workload.
What still gets me is how natural the agent sounds on the phone — it's even got a sense of humor. And when it's not sure about something, Fisher doesn't bluff — it'll say “I'm new here and might make a mistake.” Customers really appreciate that kind of honesty.
I am continually impressed by the responsiveness and professionalism of the Brainova team. Brainova's devotion to our partnership is clearly shown by their unbelievable turnaround times; bugs and even feature requests are often addressed by mid-week. Brainova Inventory handles the mindless data entry for me so I can put my skills forward and make a bigger difference.
I'll be honest — I didn't think AI could meet the bar our customers expect. We've been doing this since 1986 and we're known for knowing our stuff. Then I heard the agent talk. Nine months later it's answering nearly every call, the catalog's moving, and profits are up at least 25%. I'm a believer now.
“Get started, or get left behind.”