Life before kim.cc
Kahawa 1893 is a coffee brand built on a very specific frustration.
Margaret Nyamumbo grew up on her grandfather's coffee farm in Kenya, watching women do most of the work and walk away with very little of the money. That stayed with her through Harvard, through a career on Wall Street, and eventually became the reason she walked away from all of it.
She came back to that problem and built something around it.
- Kahawa 1893 sources directly from women farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Congo.
- Every bag has a QR code so customers can tip the farmers directly.
- They're now in Trader Joe's, Target, and Sprouts.
- When they got into Trader Joe's, they became the first Black-owned, woman-owned coffee brand to ever do it.
Then Shark Tank happened. With it came a level of attention the team hadn't quite planned for.
Customer inquiries started coming in faster than the team could keep up with. People had questions about their orders, about shipping, about the blends, and about how the farmer tipping worked. Corey Stary, who runs ops and revenue at Kahawa 1893, found the team spending more and more time buried in the inbox when that time should have been going toward actually growing the business.
"Before using kim.cc, my team was getting overwhelmed answering the same refund queries, the same 'where's my order' questions, over and over again."
— Corey Stary, VP of Ops and Revenue, Kahawa 1893
What they were looking for
Kahawa had already tried a few things. None of it worked.
Freelancers from Upwork seemed reasonable until the quality started slipping and managing them became a job of its own. Local hires were too expensive for where the brand was at the time. Keeping it internal just meant the ops team kept getting pulled away from what they were actually supposed to be doing.
What they needed wasn't just someone to sit in the inbox and close tickets. They wanted a system that could represent the brand, handle a frustrated customer without dropping the ball, and do all of it without Corey having to check in every other day.
- A real extension of the team. Not a contractor who needed to be managed like one.
- Consistency they could count on. Support that showed up every day knowing the product and the tone, without needing hand-holding every time something new came up.
- Someone who actually got the brand. Kahawa 1893 isn't a generic coffee company and their customers know it. A reply that sounded like it came from anywhere could do more damage than no reply at all.
- No new layer to manage. The whole point was to free up the internal team, not give them a new job supervising whoever they'd brought in to help.
- Pricing that made sense. Not an enterprise contract, not freelancer unpredictability. Something built for a DTC brand at their stage.
How kim.cc helped
Margaret had a clear sense of what good support should feel like for a brand like Kahawa 1893.
"Coffee is personal. The people who buy it have a story, a preference, a reason. And when something goes wrong, they don't want a bot. They want someone who gets it."
— Margaret Nyamumbo, Founder and CEO, Kahawa 1893
The goal was never to automate their way out of customer conversations. It was to make every conversation feel personal, accurate, and on-brand, at whatever speed and scale the business needed.
Kahawa 1893 started with kim.cc's 14-day free trial. Kim's AI went to work inside Gorgias, the helpdesk Kahawa 1893 was already using, and started resolving the majority of inbound tickets instantly. No migration, no disruption, no learning curve on their end.
Behind the AI, Sentinels monitored, validated, and continuously refined every interaction. They caught anything the AI got wrong, stepped in on tickets that needed real judgment, and kept retraining the AI so it got sharper over time.
- The brand voice held from week one. Sentinels made sure tone and context stayed consistent across every ticket, regardless of what time of day it came in or how the AI first drafted it.
- The scope grew without anyone asking it to. Inbound support expanded naturally to cover wholesale and marketing queries too.
- Sentinels stayed close, without getting in the way. The AI handled the volume in real time; Sentinels caught exceptions, hallucinations, and anything that needed a human call. Customers got complete answers quickly without ever feeling like they were talking to a machine, and without the machine ever being left unchecked.
- Everyone knew the same things. Product knowledge, policies, and brand context stayed centralised, so every customer got the same quality of answer no matter when their ticket came in or who reviewed it.
The impact
Support came off Corey's plate and stayed off it. The team got back to the work that actually moved the business forward.
|
68%
Faster First Response
First response time dropped by 68%, helping customers get answers sooner. |
40%
Faster Resolution
Ticket resolution time improved by 40%, reducing the time customers spent waiting for complete answers. |
|
4.5 / 5
CSAT Score
Kahawa 1893 maintained a 4.5 out of 5 customer satisfaction score while handling support at greater speed and scale. |
80%+
Minimal Back-and-Forth
More than 80% of inquiries were resolved with minimal back-and-forth. |
"We have been able to focus on other aspects of our business while kim.cc has taken over all our customer service requests."
— Corey Stary, VP of Ops and Revenue, Kahawa 1893
For a team whose actual work is building something that puts money back in the hands of farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Congo, getting those hours back matters more than any number on a report.
"As Kahawa grew, maintaining consistent answers across multiple support representatives became increasingly important. AI helped centralise institutional knowledge and ensure every customer received the same high-quality experience."
— Margaret Nyamumbo, Founder and CEO, Kahawa 1893
