Fanatics used Codex to build "Shop the Look" across a 1.5M-item catalog

#What changed

Fanatics Commerce runs hundreds of league and team stores with more than 1.5 million SKUs and roughly a thousand new items a week. Photo shoots and hand-styled outfits could not keep up, and shoppers were spending 30+ minutes digging through the catalog. Working with OpenAI, the team used Codex to build a tool that reads product and catalog data, pairs a jersey with in-stock hats, socks, and accessories from the same team, and re-checks those pairings as stock changes. The feature now appears on product pages.

#Results

• Fanatics' chief product officer Justin Tsai told CNBC that views of suggested items rose 10% after launch.
• Posts citing OpenAI's own write-up say it was tested on about 30,000 MLB products and that Codex helped test the first 50 looks in under 24 hours.
• The metric is engagement, not revenue. Fanatics has not published a sales lift tied to the feature.

#Who is affected

E-commerce and marketplace teams with large or fast-changing catalogs, and developers using Codex to build recommendation or merchandising tools.

#What to do now

The hard part was not the model, it was the matching rules: team and player alignment ("no Giants hat for a Dodgers fan") and in-stock filtering. If you are building catalog features with Codex, encode those hard constraints in the data and the checks first, then let Codex generate and validate candidates in bulk.

#What is not confirmed

Reported by CNBC (Oct 26, 2026) with on-record quotes from Fanatics and OpenAI. The 10% figure is the company's own number and is not independently verified. The 30,000-product and 24-hour details come from posts summarizing OpenAI's page and were not checked against that page directly.

#Sources

• CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/fanatics-openai-codex-sports-merchandise-shopping.html
• X post sharing the CNBC report (@BlueCrewViking): https://x.com/BlueCrewViking/status/2114705472527737040
• X post summarizing OpenAI's page (@Chahatusharma): https://x.com/Chahatusharma/status/2114729260329861257