Kokoro Farm · Belgrade, Montana · Wholesale cut flowers
Kokoro's problem was never growing the flowers. It was everything that had to happen before one of them left the field.
Ask Meara what a week actually looked like and the answer had nothing to do with flowers. It was the updating, and how late at night she was still doing it.
"Constant updating, lack of connection between the order forms, inventory and analytics. Having to update them all separately, lots of manual work."
That's Meara, spending 3 to 4 hours a week doing all of it by hand, usually late at night after a full day in the field.
Every week Meara updated a Google Sheet with what was available, exported it to a PDF, then copied her vendor email addresses out of last week's sent folder because there was no organized list anywhere. Orders came back however each vendor felt like sending them. A text, a phone call, a reply to the email. She retyped all of it into her own tracking, then handled invoicing and sales tracking separately.
When the season got busy, the whole thing stopped. The availability email sometimes went unsent for two weeks straight, and vendors who never heard from her simply didn't order. The flowers were in the cooler. Nobody knew.
Everything downstream runs itself.
Kokoro does not sell the way a standard storefront expects. Availability changes every cycle. Two ordering windows run each week and close as soon as harvest starts. Products move by stem, by bunch, and by bucket. Account types carry different pricing, and pickup and delivery run side by side. Off-the-shelf platforms could not bend that far, so the system was built around how the farm already works instead of the other way around.
Meara updates what's available in one place and sends it out. Vendors get a link to exactly what's in the cooler that week, with photos, prices, and real quantities.
Stock drops the moment an order is placed, so the second florist to open the email sees what's actually left, not what was there Monday.
Ordering opens and closes on its own around the Tuesday and Friday cycles. Nothing lands after harvest has already started.
Vendor, line items, totals, all attached. Nothing gets retyped.
Vendors choose which one they want at checkout, and the choice rides along with the order. Delivery addresses outside the farm's range are blocked at the door, so an order Meara cannot fulfill never gets placed.
Invoicing used to be its own separate evening job. Now a florist checks out with a card, Venmo, or pay at pickup, and the payment posts back onto the order by itself. Declines, retries, and refunds all land on the right record without anyone chasing them. Meara opens her dashboard and sees who has paid.
Order processing went from 3 to 4 hours down to under 10 minutes.
Availability goes out every cycle. The two-week gaps that quietly cost the farm orders are gone.
Orders land complete and itemized, so nothing gets mistyped on the way in.
Card payments clear at checkout and post back on their own. Invoicing stopped being a separate job.
"Sarah is incredibly detailed and talented, executing our business needs with patience and timeliness."
"Sarah Swendseid Consulting curated a unique, automated online ordering system for our farm that many other platforms could not. This system required creativity to meet the specified needs of numerous variables and customer account types. We now offer seasonal products to vendors, allowing us to represent our farm brand authentically and with confidence. Sarah is incredibly detailed and talented, executing our business needs with patience and timeliness. With her guidance and specialized services, our small business can build and maintain essential vendor relationships."
Airtable holds products, vendors, orders, and settings, and is the single source of truth. A custom front end gives vendors the availability view and the order form. n8n runs everything between them: the availability send, order processing, inventory updates, the payment webhook, and the scheduled jobs that open and close each ordering cycle. Square handles card payments and reports back. Meara works entirely out of Airtable and never touches the workflow layer.
Two overlapping cycles a week, each opening and closing on schedule, with an independent clock check layered underneath so a stale flag can never leave ordering open after harvest has started.
Line items capture the price at the moment of the order. Changing a product price today does not silently rewrite what last season's revenue says.
A confirmation email failing must never cost a florist their order. The order is written first, and email is treated as a side effect that can fail loudly without taking the submission down with it.
Declines, retries, partial refunds, and walk-up card sales at the farm all arrive through the same webhook. Every event is matched back to its order or deliberately ignored, so nothing lands on the wrong record.
Most of what I build starts the same way. Somebody describes the task they do manually every week and already knows there has to be a better way. Tell me what yours is and I'll be straight with you about what's possible.