The before
Surge Stores started as a single FMCG supermarket in Capital City, Lilongwe in 2022. By the start of 2026, founder Limbani Phiri had a clear thesis: small Malawian cities deserve a modern grocery experience, and there were six obvious sites within two hours’ drive of Lilongwe waiting for one.
The problem wasn’t demand. It was the operating model.
- Each store ran its own paper stockbook
- A WhatsApp group with five suppliers handled re-orders
- An accountant came in on Saturdays to consolidate till tapes
- Owner Limbani drove between stores every weekend to physically count
- Best-selling SKUs went out of stock for days because nobody saw the trend until restock day
The math didn’t work. Either the chain stayed at two stores, or the operating model had to change.
The decision
Surge spent six weeks in early 2026 evaluating options. Two cloud-native African retail platforms, one international ERP, and Letts Commerce.
The Letts pitch was different on three points:
- Mobile money first, not a card-first system bolted to mobile money
- MWK natively, no “USD-with-MWK-overlay”
- One platform across POS, inventory, and ERP — not a marketplace of integrations to maintain
Limbani signed in March 2026. The plan: pilot the Letts stack in two existing stores for six weeks, then open Store #3 with the new model from day one.
The pilot
- Weeks 1–2 — Hardware + cutover. LettsPOS terminals shipped to both Lilongwe stores in 24 hours. Both stores ran parallel (paper + Letts) for 5 days. Then paper stopped.
- Week 3 — Recipe-driven inventory. Every SKU mapped to its supplier in LettsOS. Re-order rules configured. The WhatsApp group went quiet within a week.
- Weeks 4–5 — Daily P&L by store. Tadala configured per-store dashboards. Limbani’s Saturday store-counting trips ended.
- Week 6 — Multi-store roll-up. Group-level views in LettsOS showed the two stores side-by-side. Inter-store transfers tracked. The third store got the green light.
What changed
“We went from 2 stores to 8 in 12 months. The operations team is the same three people. Without Letts, we would have hired six more by now — and still been guessing.”
A year in:
The qualitative shifts the team mentions first:
- Inter-store transfers in minutes, not days. A spike in shampoo demand at the Mzuzu store now triggers a transfer request to Lilongwe Central inside the platform — confirmed and on the road in under an hour.
- Suppliers self-serve. Five anchor suppliers connect via Letts Marketplace and see live stock levels for products they sell into Surge. POs flow electronically. The WhatsApp group is now just for chitchat.
- Pricing changes propagate group-wide. Promotional pricing for “back-to-school” rolled out across all 8 stores in 4 minutes. Previously this took the regional manager (now redeployed to expansion) two days driving between stores.
- The dashboard tells Limbani where to drive. Saturday store visits are now “the store with the worst margin variance” — not all of them.
What's next
Surge is opening locations 9 and 10 in Salima and Nkhotakota in Q3 2026. The model is now boring: lease the site, fit it out, ship LettsPOS hardware, train staff in 3 days, open. Operations head office stays at three people.
Tadala’s parting note for chain operators considering the move:
“The hardest thing about going from 2 to 8 stores is that nothing about your operations stops working — the model just keeps going. With paper, every new store stretches the seams further. With Letts, every new store fits the shape that’s already there.”
Products used
- LettsPOS — point of sale, barcode, mobile-money, multi-store
- LettsOS — multi-location inventory, daily P&L, supplier reconciliation, inter-store transfers
- Letts Marketplace — verified supplier catalogue, electronic POs, payment terms
Want to dig deeper?
- The full multi-location retail playbook — based on Surge’s actual rollout
- Letts Commerce for Retail — vertical landing page covering multi-store inventory, POS, and supplier management
- Talk to our retail team — happy to share more chain-operations detail under NDA