Interview with Sarah Chen

Honestly, the first thing I do is open my email and start working through wholesale orders. Cafes email us their orders overnight — sometimes as a PDF order form, sometimes just in the body of the email. I have to read each one, log into Shopify, find the right products, set the wholesale prices, and create the order manually. That alone takes me 2-3 hours every morning before I can do anything else.

We get about 25-30 wholesale orders a day now, up from maybe 8 a year ago. Each one takes me anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes depending on complexity — some cafes order the same SKUs every week so those are quick, but new ones or special blends take longer because I have to look up codes. I feel like a human copy-paste machine, honestly.

Once Shopify has the order, Tom in the warehouse picks and packs it. He prints the packing slip, then I have to log into the Australia Post portal and create shipping labels by re-typing the customer address. Shopify and Auspost don't talk to each other for our wholesale orders for some reason, so I copy address blocks across. Then once it's shipped I update a master tracking spreadsheet in Google Sheets that the cafes can see.

Every Monday I export a CSV from Shopify with the previous week's orders, then export another CSV from Xero with the wholesale invoices, then a third from our Instagram Shop. I combine all three in a Google Sheet, write a few formulas to break it down by product and channel, then format it into a one-page summary I email to Marcus, our founder. It takes me about 4 hours every Monday morning. Marcus reads it in 5 minutes.

Slack for internal chat, Gmail for cafe communication, Klaviyo for email marketing campaigns, Notion for our internal SOPs. We had Zapier connecting some of it for a while but it broke when Shopify changed their API last year and we never got around to fixing it. So now everything is back to manual.

Two things. First, wrong wholesale prices — I have a price sheet but if I'm rushing and click the retail variant by accident, the cafe gets the wrong invoice and I have to refund and reissue. Happens maybe once a week. Second, the inventory mismatch — Shopify's stock count is always wrong because Tom updates inventory in his own spreadsheet first, then I update Shopify when I have time. We've oversold things twice this month.

Honestly? I want a system where wholesale cafes have an account, they place orders themselves through a portal, the system knows their pricing, the order flows straight into Shopify, the shipping label is auto-generated, Tom's inventory updates automatically, and Marcus's Monday report just appears in his inbox without me touching it. That would give me back probably 3 days a week. I could actually do strategic operations work instead of being a glorified data-entry clerk.

Just one thing — I sometimes forget to mention that I also chase cafes for late payments. Priya in finance handles invoicing but the chasing falls to me because I have the cafe relationships. That probably eats another 2 hours a week. Beyond that, you've covered it.