A state of peace, health, and well-being. That’s what “alaffia” (a common greeting from central Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) means, and it’s what Alaffia (a natural beauty company with a strong ethical supply chain built on cooperatives in Africa) delivers to its customers with Cin7’s help.
Alaffia wasn’t meant to be a retail business selling high quality, safe, and effective beauty products (which it is, and it does). Instead, it began as a fair-trade social enterprise created by founders Olowo-n’djo Tchala and Prairie Rose Hyde.
Hyde, a Peace Corps volunteer from Washington State, met Tchala in Togo, West Africa, in 1996. Though they didn’t know it at the time, their shared passion for helping people would ignite a dream: to create jobs for West African women so they could escape poverty and achieve gender equality.
The dream became reality in 2003 when the now married couple established a shea butter cooperative for women in Togo. Fast forward to today and Alaffia is a successful enterprise based out of Olympia, Washington that offers luxurious, cruelty-free products (such as African Black Soap, coconut-oil-based lotions and washes, Good Soap bars, and Good Fizz bath bombs), which are available in stores like Whole Foods and Sprouts as well as through Amazon. Their products are created with indigenous, fairly traded ingredients from West Africa women cooperatives using traditional African recipes and developed in U.S. manufacturing facilities.
As a social enterprise, Alaffia has a mission to “invest in a more equitable future” and puts its money where its mouth is by using its profits to support empowerment projects that help ensure women receive fair wages, maternal care, and advanced education. Alaffia also champions environmental sustainability for the communities it supports.
But the glow brought by the organization and its mission was being dampened by a complicated, costly, and high maintenance ERP.
“We were using NetSuite, and it was too robust for the level of sales we were doing,” explains Ellie Novotny, Finance and Business Intelligence Manager. “It was just a very complex system, and because we’re a really lean team, we couldn’t support such a big build.”
Enter Cin7, a toxic-free, nourishing inventory management solution (IMS) that could help Alaffia get its shine back.
Alaffia’s need to cleanse itself of NetSuite boils down to the system’s complexity. And price tag.
“NetSuite was too complex in terms of its integrations with QuickBooks and the amount of data maintenance required,” Ellie says. “We also don’t really have that many SKUs, so a smaller ERP was the way to go. Plus, cost was a huge factor, too.”
There were other telltale signs that wiping the slate clean would be a good idea, such as the team’s need for:
Fortunately for them, the search for a better fitting solution was a relatively easy one. “We acquired a brand, and it was working in Cin7. We ultimately decided it was either go with NetSuite or go with Cin7, and we chose Cin7.”
And according to Alexa Doyle, Controller, they’re glad they did.
“Cin7 is straightforward. The interface is very clean and navigation is easy. There’s also a direct integration to QuickBooks, and it’s great to have the inventory system and the accounting system connected.”
Every business knows that time is of the essence, and for Alaffia, getting up and operational on the new system quickly was essential. Cin7 made it happen. “We implemented and integrated Cin7 within a week.”
A fast deployment, with some early fine tuning, meant the benefits weren’t far behind. One example? Cin7’s direct integration with Shopify, which supports their need for cleaner data handling and operational efficiency.
“The beauty of the integration into Shopify and Cin7 is just doing one sales order per day through Shopify, which helps with our data load,” says Ellie. “We can also map our SKUs easier as well as follow our discounts and have them mapped to the correct accounting.”
It also didn’t hurt that integrating with QuickBooks via Cin7 sped up reconciliation and supports audits and tax requirements by creating a drill-down workflow, from QuickBooks line items back to Cin7 transaction detail. Having an audit log provides user and action traceability, improving internal control confidence.
Another natural benefit of choosing Cin7? Expiry-date management and reporting.
“We have a policy of not selling anything that is going to expire in 90 days, so when the supply chain team needs to potentially donate or dispose of those items, they can get the information easily from Cin7,” Alexa says.
They’re also able to respond quickly to any unexpected quality issues.
“We had a recall not too long ago,” Ellie shares. “One of our raw materials wasn’t up to our standards, so we were able to trace the lots, pull them, send it back to our third-party manufacturer, and rework the product. That saved us a lot of liability because it never reached our customers. We were able to resolve it right away.”
Here’s one more clarifying benefit: with Cin7, inventory visibility took a big leap forward, helping the Alaffia team reduce stockouts and protect revenue. They use Cin7 reporting outputs to monitor inventory levels along with open orders and Cin7 data (stock, sales orders, and POs) to anticipate shortages more than four weeks out, ensuring expedited purchases. When seasonal demand arrived earlier than anticipated one year, the team used Cin7 to change their fulfillment flow.
“Instead of actually receiving the PO at our warehouse then shipping it to our customer, we were able to use Cin7 to fix the timeline and ship the PO directly from our third-party manufacturer. It took out the middleman, saved us a lot of time, and let us get the sales within a certain month period.”
Speaking of POs, Alaffia’s PO workflows have never been simpler. They’re now easy to create, update, and receive while helpful system notifications support Alaffia’s day-to-day purchasing cadence.
And Ellie says Cin7’s reports don’t disappoint.
“We use a lot of reporting out of Cin7. It’s helped us a lot in terms of understanding where any lags in sales are coming from and what our projected sales are versus our forecasts.”
Cin7 is Alaffia’s single source of truth. It delivers accurate product and customer lists, streamlined integrations, reduced stockouts, greater support for tax and audit questions, better recall containment, multi-channel inventory confidence, and operational time savings across the board.
The Alaffia team plans to translate these Cin7 wins into further growth, such as offering their highly performing Good Soap and Good Fizz (and other products) in additional retailers as well as through their D2C channel. They also plan to launch new body washes (coming soon!) while continuing their outreach efforts, including building wells to provide clean water for communities in need.
“With Cin7, we’re looking forward to just more expansion of how we’re supporting the women in the cooperatives that we source from and work for. That’s really the heart and soul of the organization.”