By Joe “Mr. Yabera” Jenovese
Founder, Y.A.Bera Clothing
October 15, 2026
On my 2nd cortadito
There was a stretch of time when I seriously considered closing Y.A.Bera.
Not because the guayaberas weren't good. Not because customers stopped caring. And not because I'd lost belief in what the brand stands for. I came very close to shutting the doors because the treatment that saved my life took something from me that I didn't know I could lose: the sharpness I had built a career on.
This is the story of how that happened, how it nearly ended Y.A.Bera Clothing, and how AI became an important tool in bringing it back. I'm telling it honestly and plainly, because I think it's useful to other business owners, other creatives, and anyone who has watched a health crisis rearrange their goals and working life.
What Chemo Brain Actually Takes
When people hear "cancer survivor," they picture the finish line: the last treatment, the all-clear, the relief. What they don't picture is the long tail.
Chemotherapy left me with lasting side effects, and the one that hit hardest was what's commonly called chemo brain. If you haven't lived it, here's the closest description I can give: it's a fog that settles over the exact skills you rely on most. Focus slips. Word retrieval slows. Multi-step tasks that used to run on autopilot now demand effort, and sometimes they simply fall apart halfway through. Working memory, the mental scratchpad that lets you hold ten things at once while you build something, doesn't hold what it used to.
For most jobs, that's a hardship. For a career graphic designer running a luxury clothing brand, it felt like a verdict.
My whole professional identity was built on being fast, precise, and visually sharp. I could hold a design layout, a color system, a brand voice, and a deadline in my head at the same time. After treatment, I'd open a project and just stare at it. The ideas were still in there somewhere, but the machinery to organize them and execute them had slowed to a crawl.
I won't pretend I handled it gracefully. There were days I told myself the best thing to do was to stop. Running a clothing brand is relentless: product, content, designs, marketing, wholesale conversations, customer questions, production with the artisans in Yucatán. If I couldn't trust my own mind to carry that load, what was I doing?
The Side-Work Disappeared
Y.A.Bera was never my only business. For decades, I’d been a working graphic designer, and that freelance work was my safety net. It was also a big part of how I kept the brand funded in its early years.
Then the work just disappeared, and it happened from two directions at once.
The first was my health. Clients need reliability and fast turnarounds, and after treatment I couldn’t promise either anymore.
The second was AI. Much of what I’d spent decades perfecting was being replaced by AI-generated designs, the kind of generic, soulless work people have started calling slop. It wasn’t better. It was cheaper, and for a lot of clients, cheap won. The standards they used to hold designers to gave way to a lower price, and the craft that took me a career to build was suddenly competing with something that cost almost nothing and took seconds.
That loss hurt in two ways: the obvious financial hit, and the quieter one, losing the part of my identity that said I’m a designer, and I’m good at it. It’s hard to watch your life’s work get undercut by the same technology you’re being told will change everything.
I remember thinking this was the moment the story ends. The side-work was gone, my focus was unreliable, and the brand I’d built around my late mother’s and grandfather’s names was depending on a version of me I wasn’t sure existed anymore.
The Decision to Go All In
Here's what changed. Losing the side-work removed every excuse for splitting my attention. There was no more "I'll work on Y.A.Bera when the client work slows down." The client work was gone. Y.A.Bera was all that was left, and I realized that was also an opportunity I'd never had before.
I decided to put 150% of what I had into the brand. Not 100%, because 100% of me was now a different number than it used to be, and I needed to account for that honestly. It meant something else: every ounce of focus, creativity, and stubbornness, pointed at one thing, with whatever help I could find to make up the difference.
That's where AI came in.
I didn't approach it as a gimmick or a shortcut. I approached it the way you'd approach a prosthetic or a mobility aid: as a tool that closes the gap between what I know and what my body and brain can currently execute. My expertise hadn't gone anywhere. My taste hadn't gone anywhere. My style was still superb. What I needed was a way to get that expertise out of my head and into the world without every step costing me three times the energy.
The Village
Before I talk about tools, I need to be clear about something: AI didn't save me. People did. A handful of them became my village during chemo - the ones who showed up, who kept me laughing, who reminded me who I was when the fog tried to take that too. My sanity and my inspiration came from them, not from software. AI would never be a tool helping my brand if those people hadn't helped me as a person first. Everything I rebuilt stands on what they carried me through.
Where AI Actually Fit
I want to be specific, because "AI helped my business" is the kind of vague claim that means nothing.
It became my working memory. Chemo brain attacks the mental scratchpad, so I started using AI as an external one. I could dump a half-formed idea, a list of product details, a brand principle, or a messy paragraph, and get it back organized. Instead of losing the thread between thought and execution, I had a partner who could hold the structure while I focused on the substance.
It helped me write and structure long-form content. Y.A.Bera has always been a brand with a story to tell: the guayabera's history, the artisans in Yucatán, the family names behind the brand, the argument that Latino design deserves a seat in luxury. Telling those stories well takes sustained concentration, which was exactly the thing I'd lost. With AI, I could outline, draft, and refine at a pace my brain could sustain, while keeping my own voice and my own judgment as the final filter.
It lowered the mental and emotional cost of iteration. Creative work depends on trying things, discarding most of them, and keeping what works. When every attempt costs you disproportionate mental energy, you stop iterating, and quality suffers. AI made iteration "cheap" again. I could explore ten directions in the time it used to take me to wrestle with one.
It helped me stay consistent. A brand is built on consistency: the same standards, the same voice, the same level of care, month after month. When your energy is unpredictable, consistency is the first casualty. Having a system to help me maintain it meant the brand didn't have to rise and fall with my best and worst days.
None of this replaced me. It amplified what I could still do and covered for what I couldn't, at least for a while.
The Part Nobody Talks About: Not Looking Like a Luxury Model
There's another piece of this story that's more personal, and I think it matters just as much.
Y.A.Bera is a luxury guayabera brand. In the fashion world, luxury comes with an unspoken image attached: tall, polished, conventionally model-handsome, photographed in perfect light. I'm semi-chubby, 5'7". I'm missing fingers. I don't look like the person the luxury industry usually puts in front of the camera.
Now - before this turns into a pity party, let me be clear about something. I still have the exorbitantly high confidence of an only-child Cuban American mommas boy, and chemo didn't touch that. I told my oncologist and everyone I met, "I already beat the cancer, my body just has to catch up". It took my hair, it took my focus, it took my freelance clients. It did not take the pretty eyes and the eyes don't lie chico.
For a long time, I felt that model/expectation gap, and so did the content. When I'd try to create imagery and marketing for the brand, my thoughts kept drifting toward the same uncomfortable point: the guy modeling this luxury brand doesn't look like a luxury fashion model. It crept into how I thought about showing up. It made me hesitate for years about putting a face or a body to the brand at all.
I want to be careful here, because the answer isn't "pretend otherwise" and it isn't "my appearance doesn't matter." The honest truth is that visual presentation matters in luxury fashion, and the quality of a brand's imagery signals the quality of its product. My garments are handcrafted from luxury fabrics, with hand-set pin-tuck pleats, iconic pocket placements, built by artisans with generations of skill. The content around them needs to match that standard, or it undersells the work.
That's where my graphic design background and AI came together.
Expertise Is the Filter
Here's the thing about AI tools that people misunderstand: they don't have taste. They generate options. The value comes from the person who knows what great looks like and can tell the difference between what's close and what's right.
I've spent my career in graphic design. I know composition, color, typography, lighting, and how premium brands communicate restraint and confidence. That expertise is what turns AI from a random image generator into a real creative tool. I know what to ask for, I know what to reject, I know how to edit, and I know when something feels cheap even if it's technically impressive.
So I started using AI to create content that reflects the actual quality and luxury of Y.A.Bera, directed by an eye that's been trained for decades. The goal was never to fake anything about the garments. The goal was to stop letting my own appearance, or my limited energy, or the lack of a big production budget, limit how the brand could be presented.
A major fashion house can hire a studio, a model, a photographer, a stylist, and a retoucher. I'm a one-person creative team recovering from chemo. AI gave me access to a level of visual execution that would otherwise have been out of reach, and my design experience made sure the result met the standard the product and brand deserves.
It also changed something internal. The brand stopped being bottlenecked by whether I fit a template, and started being judged on what actually matters: the craftsmanship, the stories, and the garments themselves.
The Rules I Set for Myself
Using AI in a luxury, handcrafted brand comes with responsibility, and I'd rather state my rules openly than leave anyone guessing.
The garments are handmade, period. Every Y.A.Bera guayabera is produced by hand by skilled artisans in Yucatán, Mexico. AI plays no part in making the shirts. Nothing about the construction, the fabric, the design, or the finishing is automated or synthetic. All of our collections include real garments made by real people.
The product must be represented honestly. Marketing content can be polished, but it should never mislead a customer about what they're buying. The fabric, the cut, the details, and the color have to look the way they actually are (which was already difficult in the modern age). Luxury depends on trust, and trust doesn't survive a gap between the screen and the shirt.
Taste stays human. AI proposes. I decide. Every piece of content that goes out passes through my judgment, my design experience, and my sense of what belongs to this brand. If it doesn't feel like Y.A.Bera, it doesn't see the light of day.
AI serves the missions, not the other way around. One mission is to put Latino craftsmanship where it belongs: in the conversation about luxury, on its own terms. Tools are only useful to the extent they serve that.
What It Changed for the Brand
Looking back, the part I find most striking is how much the crisis clarified.
Before, I was splitting my energy between design clients and the brand, always treating Y.A.Bera as the thing I'd get to when I had time. Illness removed that option and forced a choice. Choosing the brand, fully, with AI helping me carry the load.
The content got better. The storytelling got deeper. The brand's presence, from the website to the editorial work to the way we talk about heritage and craftsmanship, became more consistent and more confident. We've been able to build out wedding programs, custom options through our custom logo guayabera program, and conversations with retailers through our wholesale program, all while I rebuilt my own capacity.
I don't think that happens if I try to keep doing everything the old way, at the old speed, out of pride.
What I'd Tell Other Founders
If you're a founder or a creative dealing with a health challenge that's changed how your mind or body works, a few things I learned the hard way:
Your expertise survives. Even when execution gets harder, the knowledge, taste, and judgment you built over your lifetime don't evaporate. The challenge is building a bridge from what you know to what you can currently produce.
Using tools isn't weakness. Nobody calls a cane or a calendar cheating. If a tool lets you keep doing meaningful work, using it is just good judgment.
Be honest with your customers and yourself. I'd rather be open about how I work than hide it. Transparency builds more trust than a polished story ever could.
Don't make decisions at your lowest point if you can avoid it. I came close to quitting at a moment when I couldn't see the way forward. The way forward existed. I just hadn't found it yet.
Why This Is Still a Luxury Story
Some people will read this and wonder whether using AI undermines the idea of a luxury brand. I understand the question, and I think the answer comes down to where the luxury actually lives.
It lives in the shirt. In the hand-set pleats, the natural linens, the artisans in Yucatán who've spent generations perfecting their craft, and the family memories stitched into the name. That part is not negotiable, and it is not automated.
What AI changed is everything around the shirt: how a one-person team recovering from serious illness can still tell the brand's story at the level it deserves. It's the difference between a great product that nobody sees clearly and a great product presented the way it should be.
I'm missing fingers. I'm not a fashion model height. I live with crohn's, I went through chemo and came out with a mind that works differently than it used to. And I'm building a luxury guayabera brand anyway, with every tool, every bit of design experience, and every ounce of stubbornness I have.
That's not a limitation on the brand. That's the story of it.
Con amor y respeto,
Joe “Mr. Yabera” Jenovese
Y.A.Bera Clothing Modern Guayaberas is a Miami-based luxury menswear brand handcrafting guayaberas in Yucatán, Mexico. Explore the collection at yabera.com.
