Background: Record growth for specialty coffee brand
Kahawa 1893 founder-CEO Margaret Nyamumbo , a coffee aficionado and Harvard Business School graduate, built a specialty coffee brand that honors the African women who grow 90% of the world's coffee. Since meeting the Kahawa team in late 2023, every month has been a record month. This is an incredibly awesome problem to have, and her longtime business partner, VP of Revenue & Operations Corey Stary , would agree—just with a few more caveats.
Challenge: Scaling beyond spreadsheets
Across a mountain of spreadsheets, Corey and team had constructed functional inventory management systems, procurement processes, issuance of freight quotes, invoicing, and more. But they were growing too fast for their team to keep up. They needed to cut down the time it took to process orders without introducing data entry errors.
"As we scaled our business and took on more customers, we faced unprecedented complexity — more SKUs, more manufacturing partners, more logistical considerations. We faced pressure to fill increasingly large orders more quickly than we ever had. We needed to get our house in order, and Doss was the answer. I no longer sweat when I get a big Purchase Order!"
— Corey Stary, VP Revenue & Operations at Kahawa 1893
As the business grew and they took on more headcount, a single error could cost thousands of dollars, or worse, a relationship with a client.
Solution: Automated workflows with intelligent guardrails
DOSS quickly constructed multiple workflows that addressed Kahawa's core needs across procurement, order management, inventory management, and freight & fulfillment:
- Procurement : Customized POs with separate shipping destinations, line item data for SKU UPCs, pack and unit sizing, and formulas for computing prices and quantities—all generated and sent to vendors automatically.
- Order management : Received orders from Kahawa’s wholesale accounts, eliminating human error via Custom Work Order forms with smart lookups on SKU-variant pricing tables, filtered by vendor to show only relevant options and prevent selection errors. Workflows for each order type (Stock Orders, Work Orders, Pallet Instructions) automatically route to the correct party, with the right format and attachments.
- Inventory management : Processed orders to either pull from stock held by their vendors or issue work orders for direct fulfillment , transferring stock between locations.
DOSS manages wholesale order receipt, processes orders to either pull from vendor-held stock or issue work orders for direct fulfillment, transfers stock between locations, and provides SKU-variant pricing with cost-flow-through to POS.
"I love seeing the overall state of our business in a single location. DOSS is our source of truth for just about everything."
— Corey Stary, VP Revenue & Operations at Kahawa 1893
Impact: From 10 minutes to 20 seconds per order
The time it took to process one order dropped from about 10 minutes to 20 seconds—30x faster, while improving accuracy across fulfillment and forecasting.
“We were able to build guardrails into DOSS to mitigate the risk of human error. To date, we've maintained our 100% accuracy rate on order fulfillment and patched up issues with forecasting consumption of unfinished goods.”
— Corey Stary, VP Revenue & Operations at Kahawa 1893
Beyond order processing, Kahawa now tracks inventory of both finished and unfinished goods across numerous locations throughout the US, with ongoing development of invoicing, freight, product spec, and demand planning workflows.
The Kahawa team is just getting started—they're launching office coffee services, ready-to-drink cans, a Keurig Pods partnership and more.
Learn More: Get the full 8-page case study
Interested in getting a comprehensive step-by-step for each technique? Download the complete PDF here .
