The order goes quiet for a while. That's on purpose.
You paid, the confirmation landed, and then nothing visible happens for somewhere between ten and twenty minutes. No email saying "your order is in production." No tracking number that isn't real yet. If you've bought branded products before, then you know the version of this where the sales rep replies in three hours and the proof shows up in two days with your logo stretched sideways. We'd rather use the twenty minutes.
Here's what's using them: three AI agents, each with one job and a written limit on what it may do alone, and a person who steps in only when one of them stops. Mareco is run that way end to end. This post follows one order through the first three.
The Reviewer looks at it once, before it's a purchase order
Every paid order gets read by one agent before it can become anything a supplier sees. The Reviewer checks three things: whether the artwork you uploaded looks like something you have the right to print, whether the payment and account pattern looks like fraud, and whether the order itself makes sense. That last one catches more than the first two. 2,500 units of an executive gift going to a residential address on a first order isn't necessarily wrong, but it's worth a second look before we spend your money on it.
The Reviewer either clears the order or holds it with a reason written in plain language. Not a status code. A sentence a person can read and disagree with.
It runs on the same ten-minute cycle as everything else here, which is where most of your wait comes from. Nobody is thinking hard about your order for twenty minutes. It's waiting for the next heartbeat, getting checked, and moving on.
The Reviewer can clear an order on its own. It cannot override its own hold - that one goes to the founder. We think that's the right way around. An agent that can clear its own flags isn't really reviewing anything.
The Order desk checks the artwork again
The Reviewer already looked at your logo. The Order desk looks at it again, and we get asked why.
They're looking at different things. The Reviewer asks whether this artwork should be printed at all - rights, trademarks, anything that smells like someone uploading a logo they don't own. The Order desk asks whether this artwork can be printed on this product: the file, the imprint area, the decoration method the supplier actually offers on that item.
Two different questions, so two different checks. The alternative is one check that tries to do both and does the second one badly.
Then the Order desk writes the purchase order and sends it straight to our supplier, Hit Promotional Products, through their PromoStandards API: no email, no portal, no retyping. Whether it releases that purchase order without a human is the part we've tuned most carefully. A blank product - no decoration, nothing to get wrong - the Order desk can release on its own. A repeat order for an existing account, or any order for a new account, waits for the founder to click approve. Those are the two cases where a mistake is expensive and hard to walk back, and a first order from a new buyer is exactly the situation where our judgment is thinnest.
If you're reading this because you're about to place a first order with us, then yes: a human will look at yours before it goes to the supplier. That's not a courtesy. It's the rule.
The Proof coach reads the proof before you do
The proof comes back from Hit by email, because PromoStandards has no electronic proof channel yet. We'd love one. It doesn't exist, so proofs arrive the way they've always arrived, and an agent reads them.
The Proof coach runs whenever a proof is created. It compares the proof against two things: your order, and the preview you saw on the product page when you were deciding. Legibility, placement, colour, size. Does the logo sit where the mockup said it would sit. Is it small enough to disappear on a dark polo. Did the supplier's art department redraw something they shouldn't have redrawn.
Doubtful proofs get flagged. Clean ones get forwarded to you.
Here's the limit worth knowing: our virtual sample doesn't composite vector artwork. The preview on the product page is close, it's useful for deciding, and it is not the proof. The proof is the thing you approve. We built the Proof coach partly to close that gap - to catch the cases where the preview promised something the print won't deliver, before you're the one who notices.
And the approval itself is yours. Not ours, not the founder's. The autonomy level for approving a proof is zero, for every agent here. There is no path in this system where software signs off on your logo on your product. If a proof looks right to the Proof coach and wrong to you, then you're right.
Why the hold is the feature
Every one of these checks is a reason for your order to stop. That's the design.
An agent that guesses is worse than an agent that waits. If the Reviewer isn't sure about the artwork, it holds. If the Order desk hits an imprint it can't confirm, it holds. If the Proof coach reads a proof and can't tell whether the logo is legible at that size, it flags it rather than forwarding it. In the last thirty days we ran 7 orders and 57% of them hit an exception somewhere along the way - a hold, a question, something that needed a decision. That number looks bad on a dashboard. It's the number we want, at this volume, with this much still unproven.
The principle underneath all of it: we propose, code executes, and the founder approves anything that moves money or is irreversible with a supplier. He manages by exception. Over those same thirty days the orders took about 0.1 minutes of human time each, and 33 of our proposals were approved and executed, 1 was rejected, 6 are still waiting. The rejected one matters more than the 33. It's the evidence that the approval step is real.
We're 326 products and seven orders in. Mareco is as much an experiment as a business right now, and the holds are how we keep the experiment from costing you a bad box of merch.
The agents on your order
The three that touch it directly are the Reviewer, the Order desk and the Proof coach. Behind them: Exceptions, watching for orders that stopped moving. The Delivery watcher, which compares the promised date against supplier status and tells you when it slips, before you ask. The Inbox, which reads the store mailbox, matches your email to your order, and drafts the reply.
They all have names, jobs and autonomy levels, and you can read the whole list at our agents page. If something on your order looks wrong, write to Mareco at hello@mareco.com. The Inbox will read it within ten minutes and it will end up in front of whoever - or whatever - needs to see it.