We turned operational chaos into our biggest advantage (and documented the whole process)

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Let's be real: most DTC brands get blindsided by operations.

You start with a great product, nail your Meta funnel, and scale to seven figures. Life is good. QuickBooks and Google Sheets handle everything just fine.

Then you hit $10M. Suddenly you're selling on Amazon, Walmart, Target. You've got three different 3PLs, multiple co-manufacturers, and retail buyers asking for EDI connections. Your "simple" business now has 47 moving parts.

That's when the wheels fall off.

We know because we lived it at Obvi. So we did something most DTC brands won’t: We collaborated with Jared Ward, founder and CEO of Luminous, to break down our operational transformation by creating a four-part video series. 

We call it “The Operations Show.” 

After building his own DTC brands and running Made-in-China's sourcing division, Jared founded Luminous to solve these exact problems. Luminous recently raised $6M (from investors like Serena Williams) and works with hundreds of brands scaling from $3M to nine figures.

In the show, we opened everything: our broken processes, our massive inventory discrepancy, our complete transformation. 

Today's newsletter breaks down what happened with the team who lived it: Ronak Shah (CEO), Ravi Melwani (CFO), Josh Barski (Head of Ops), and the Luminous crew, Jared and Josh Sanders (Head of Implementation) who helped turn it around.

On the Menu: 

The four-part series is live now!

If you're drowning in spreadsheets while competitors scale effortlessly, this is your roadmap out of DTC operational hell. 

👉 Watch the full series here

When we started Obvi 6 years ago, operations were simple. We were a Shopify-native collagen brand with Google Sheets tracking everything. Life was good.

We assumed we'd always be that way; a clean DTC business selling directly to customers who loved our products.

But then we hit over $90 million in sales, and those Google Sheets were holding on by a thread. 

Walmart wanted us in 4,000+ stores. Rite Aid came calling. Sprouts, Vitamin Shoppe, Amazon FBA across multiple countries. 

Suddenly we weren't a "simple" DTC brand anymore.

Each new channel brought its own complexity:

Our Google Sheets that worked perfectly for Shopify started breaking under the weight of omnichannel distribution.

What made it worse was feeling like we were the only ones drowning in this mess. 

Every founder thinks their operations are uniquely complex and that nobody else could possibly understand their specific nightmare of channels and systems and vendors.

But we quickly learned that we weren't uniquely complex at all. Every scaling brand hits this same wall. What makes it brutal is that modern commerce doesn’t scale complexity gradually. 

Growth comes fast, and the messy parts pile up almost overnight.

That “overnight complexity” comes from four decisions every scaling brand eventually makes:

These four decisions stack on top of each other until the simple systems you started with can no longer hold the weight.

At the center of Obvi’s growth were two people: Josh Barski, our head of operations, and Ravi Melwani, our CFO.

Josh managed replenishment across Shopify, Amazon FBA in three countries, Walmart retail and online, Sprouts, Rite Aid, Vitamin Shoppe, and dozens of smaller retailers. Ravi tried to keep the books accurate and the board confident.

Together they were managing nearly $100 million in revenue with nothing more than Google Sheets.

When we were smaller, adding tabs to Google Sheets felt like enough. 

But as the business grew, the cracks widened until everything blew up in our faces.

We were closing our monthly books, doing the usual reconciliation between what we calculated in our sheets and what our bookkeepers had in QuickBooks. Usually small differences, nothing crazy.

This time we were off by six figures.

Six figures of inventory just didn't exist where we thought it did. We had no idea where the money went. 

Google Sheets can't track FIFO when you're ordering 10,000 units of one SKU versus 40,000 units of the same SKU at completely different prices. Which batch did we sell? What did it actually cost? 

Nobody knew.

Here's how this happened

Take Josh’s Amazon FBA replenishment process:

That’s hours of work for just one channel. Scale that across:

…and the manual errors were inevitable.

But as the discrepancy got worse, our board started pressing us on whether we even knew our true COGS.

We knew we had to figure something out to fix this mess. We looked at systems like NetSuite, but they felt like overkill for what we needed.

At nearly $100M in revenue with six-figure inventory discrepancies, we needed a centralized, integrated system that could handle modern e-commerce complexity: accurate COGS tracking across dozens of distribution points, complex PO management, bundle and SKU handling, and real forecasting capabilities.

Not an over-engineered enterprise solution, but something purpose-built for omnichannel brands scaling fast.

The Google Sheets era was over.

We needed a system, but we also needed to face a harsh reality: 75-80% of ERP implementations fail completely.

Most brands think buying software solves their problems. Wrong. Implementation is where dreams go to die, and we were determined not to become another statistic.

So we chose Luminous and started working with Josh Sanders, their head of implementation who has guided hundreds of brands through this process.

The first step? Mapping our product catalog. The chaos was immediate.

The same product had three different names depending on the channel. Bundles created endless variations. Some SKUs existed in one system but were missing entirely in another.

When you start untangling all the different channels, SKUs, pricing, and co-packer relationships, the complexity grows exponentially. Every layer you peel back reveals more problems.

Implementation was like holding up a mirror to our operations. Every messy process and hidden inefficiency surfaced. It was uncomfortable but exactly what we needed.

Instead of handing us software and walking away, Luminous guided us through implementation:

Phase 1: Data gathering - They mapped our complete SKU disaster and pulled historical order data from every channel

Phase 2: Integrations - Connected Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, Target, and all our 3PLs. Even the ones with zero API documentation and custom systems.

Phase 3: Training - Slack channels for instant support, live calls whenever we needed help, unlimited access to their team

Phase 4: Go-live preparation - Validated every piece of data, ran through comprehensive checklists, made sure nothing would break

Phase 5: Account management - Ongoing optimization and support instead of disappearing after launch

The key to making this process work? Having an internal champion. 

Josh B, our head of operations, became that person, dedicating 20-25 hours in month one just to coordinate everything. 

Six months later, we had one system of record replacing our spreadsheet chaos. Real forecasting and automated workflows were finally possible.

Implementation forced us to face the chaos, and for the first time we had a foundation strong enough to scale.

Six months later, everything had changed.

We'd launched into 5-6 new retailers during one of the most challenging periods in recent memory. New tariffs were hitting. COGS were rising across the board. The kind of environment that breaks brands with weak operational foundations.

But we weren't breaking. We were scaling.

✅ Our inventory discrepancy dropped from six figures to $4,000 (99% improvement)

✅ Our forecasting accuracy went from Grade C to Grade A+. 

✅ Obvi’s Head of Ops daily reality completely flipped: "Prior to having that consistent truth, I would have to open 10 tabs, look at different websites, different sales channels, different 3PLs, just to make one decision. Now I have full control of all our data, and I can make informed decisions on my own."

We now had one source of truth replacing our messy spreadsheets, with real forecasting and automation capabilities we'd only dreamed about.

For the first time, our board trusted the numbers we showed them. Instead of pushing us toward a two-year NetSuite project, they saw that QuickBooks paired with Luminous gave us the control we needed without the overhead.

Six months ago, we were hemorrhaging money through spreadsheet chaos. Today, we're adding new retailers while our competitors struggle with basic inventory management.