Tina Bacon-DeFrece measures modern shopping in a small, stubborn way.
She listens for the phone.
“We’re seeing a lot more people making phone calls rather than interfacing with us on the internet,” said Bacon-DeFrece, CEO of Big Frog Custom T-Shirts & More.
That sound matters more than it should in 2026.
A growing share of the economy now treats customer interaction as a cost to cut.
Generative AI promises speed, scale and fewer humans in the loop. In a January 2024 note, the International Monetary Fund warned that nearly 40% of global jobs are at risk from AI.
Bacon-DeFrece is building for that shift, and she is betting the storefront still matters.
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Next month, Big Frog will soft-launch a full online ordering platform designed to keep each order local. The system will route the order to the nearest store and assign a named contact responsible for it, Bacon-DeFrece said.
“The order will route to the nearest store,” she said. “A local team will still handle it from start to finish.”
Big Frog is headquartered in Dunedin and was founded in Clearwater in 2008. The company operates a 75-store franchise system across the U.S. and Canada.
Big Frog plans to open at least 10 new stores in 2026, Bacon-DeFrece said, with three more scheduled to open in the next few months. She said total gross revenue was about $38 million last year.
The work people forget is work
A custom t-shirt order looks simple until someone has to place it.
A customer has to pick the garment, settle on the fit, approve the art and meet a deadline. They have to understand the cost and handle the last-minute change that always comes up after the proof.
Big Frog built its franchise around that reality. Its stores operate like boutiques, with staff guiding customers through product choices, brand options and design decisions.
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“We are a garment apparel decorator franchise system where our stores provide concierge retail decorating consultations,” Bacon-DeFrece said.
“It’s that hand-holding,” she said. “It’s a consultative process.”
Most of the job happens before the printer ever turns on.
Bacon-DeFrece said Big Frog has more than 20,000 5-star reviews and she has noticed something else over the last year: more customers are calling stores instead of ordering online.
“I think the actual online experiences have turned them off,” she said. “They’ve always been the product.”
A company built by listening
Bacon-DeFrece did not set out to run a t-shirt franchise.
She earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of South Florida and worked as a research scientist. She said she eventually grew tired of corporate bureaucracy, so she started a business with her husband and a partner.
The first concept was an online science store. Then customers started calling for something else.
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A local TV segment helped them make the choice.
“Charley Belcher, who you may know locally, featured us on Fox’s morning show,” Bacon-DeFrece said. “Everyone loved how we made t-shirts with this DTG high-tech printer. And everyone called for t-shirts and not science stuff.”
She followed the only signal that mattered: what customers kept asking to buy. Big Frog became a t-shirt business and grew without outside investment, she said.
“We were self-funded,” Bacon-DeFrece said. “We didn’t do investments.”
That shaped the company’s instincts. Big Frog learned to build slowly, test in the market and stay close enough to customers to hear them change their minds.
The AI push lives behind the counter
Big Frog sells custom apparel, then turns around and manufactures much of it in-house.
“We do manufacturing in the store,” Bacon-DeFrece said. “So we make a lot of the product ourselves.”
That is where the work gets real, when the deadline stops belonging to the customer and starts belonging to the store.
Store owners juggle schedules, staffing, machines, materials, approvals and customers who change their minds late. Bacon-DeFrece said the company’s 2026 priority is technology that reduces manual work and improves workflow.
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Big Frog offers one-on-one design work at no charge, she said. Bacon-DeFrece expects AI to help customers create designs faster and reduce the email back-and-forth tied to uniform programs and corporate orders.
“We know we can optimize email efficiencies with AI,” she said.
The goal is speed without burnout.
Big Frog wants AI to handle the drag so the staff can stay focused on the customer.
The scale problem
Big Frog began as a small-order concept.
“We originally started 1 to 100 shirts,” Bacon-DeFrece said. “But now we could do 1 to 10,000.”
Scale changes who calls, how fast they need the order and what a mistake costs.
It also changes what the brand has to deliver to its franchise owners. The system has to move faster without losing the things customers are calling for in the first place.
The website is a trust test
Bacon-DeFrece said the online platform is designed to create another revenue stream for stores and serve customers who want to order without calling.
Big Frog delayed the move for years, she said, because the company wanted the online experience to feel like the store experience.
“We want to make sure that customers feel as taken care of online as they do when they come into our store,” she said.
The system has to move faster without losing the one thing customers keep asking for: a person.
“This is the person you’ll be working with,” Bacon-DeFrece said.
Big Frog grew up in the search era, when the right URL and strong SEO could bring in customers from anywhere.
Now the company is building for a different kind of demand: customers who want a name attached to the order.
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