The platform that took a retail group's shops online and kept every branch in sync.
Our client runs the kind of shops you find on every busy street in Nairobi. Full shelves, a steady stream of customers, and a storeroom where stock was counted by hand at the end of each day. It worked until it didn't. One branch would run out of a popular line while another sat on a pile of it, and regular customers were quietly drifting to competitors they could find online.
They came to us asking for an online store. What they needed was a way to see the whole business at once. We began by mapping how stock actually moved between branches, then built a platform that keeps every location in sync as sales happen. A purchase in one shop shows up everywhere within seconds. The same system powers a storefront built for the phones their customers already use, with M-Pesa in the checkout so paying takes a moment.
For the head office we added a dashboard that turns all of this movement into plain answers. What is selling, which branch is holding stock that isn't moving, when to reorder. The evenings that used to go on reconciling notebooks now take a glance at a screen.
Six months after launch, online sales had grown by 300 percent and the cost of holding inventory had fallen by 40 percent. With operations under control, the client opened in 5 new cities, and the platform passed 50,000 active users in its first year. The shops still feel the same to walk into. Everything behind them has changed.