How Fiskal helped Darë Vegan Cheese clean up messy books, trust an outsourced partner, and make decisions with numbers they believe in
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“Somebody has to be able to know how to do this. And thankfully, when we met you, you can.”
- Company: Darë Vegan Cheese, founded 2019
- Location: Asheville, North Carolina, US
- Industry: Plant-based CPG manufacturing
About Darë Vegan Cheese
Gwendolyn Dare Hageman started Darë Vegan Cheese in 2019. The name is a pun she was, by her own telling, destined to make. Her middle name is Dare, and the brand is pronounced “dairy.” Behind the wordplay is a serious product. With a background in biology and years in the North Carolina restaurant industry, she set out to make a vegan cheese that did not feel like a sacrifice.
“I wanted to create a product that I knew that I could do better with the experience that I had from restaurant and science and fermentation… just wanting to feed people better and provide them an option that didn’t feel like a sacrifice.”
— Gwendolyn Dare Hageman, Owner and Founder
She built the first batches in a commissary kitchen while still waiting tables upstairs. The product changed her own life along the way. She later discovered a sensitivity to dairy that she had not known about until she cut it out.
The Challenge
Darë grew quickly, and the back end did not keep pace. As a bootstrapped manufacturer, Gwendolyn needed her numbers to reflect how the business actually worked, how product is made and then sold, not simply costs landing on the profit and loss as they arrived. That distinction turned out to be the hard part.
- Books that had become messy and hard to trust
- Difficulty finding anyone who understood manufacturing and could track COGS correctly
- A string of partners who could not handle the complexity, which had burned her more than once
- No reliable view of overhead against sales as the business scaled
“I didn’t really understand the back end that’s required for… effectively tracking COGS and booking those to the right things… That was a really difficult concept for a lot of people that I had worked with.”
— Gwendolyn Dare Hageman, Owner and Founder
The Turning Point
Gwendolyn had worked with a strong bookkeeper early on, someone who organized her books and taught her how the back end of QuickBooks worked. When that relationship ended, she struggled to replace it. The search wore her down, but she refused to accept that the problem was unsolvable.
“It was trust building at the beginning because I had gotten burned a couple of times and I’m like, can somebody actually do this? Somebody has to be able to know how to do this. And thankfully, when we met you, you can.”
— Gwendolyn Dare Hageman, Owner and Founder
What Fiskal did
Fiskal started by making sense of the mess that had built up, then set a path forward. One early interaction set the tone: a stuck journal entry that Pierre worked through with her directly.
- Untangled the existing books and identified what had gone wrong
- Worked through journals with her, including calculating an entry and handing the bookkeeper exactly what to post so the records reflected reality
- Established correct COGS treatment so costs are booked as product is made and then sold, not lumped onto the P&L on arrival
- Built the financial visibility she needed to read margins by channel and set KPIs
“Our first interaction was we were actually… speaking about just passing journals… all you need to do is get that into the system so that accurately reflects.”
— Pierre Goldie, CGO, Fiskal
The results
The shift was from books she could not trust to numbers she makes decisions with. That changed how she runs the business.
- She trusts her numbers and uses them to make decisions
- Clear visibility into spend, profit, and margin as percentages she can act on
- Used those numbers to evaluate sales channels by margin rather than by excitement, and to decide where not to grow
- Managers can be held to specific cost percentages because the data supports it
- 40 percent growth in direct to consumer in the first quarter
“It’s very obvious when you have numbers that make sense… where you should be putting energy and what you can be changing and all of those things.”
— Gwendolyn Dare Hageman, Owner and Founder
Looking ahead
Gwendolyn is rebalancing toward a more even spread across her omnichannel mix, with a particular focus this year on direct to consumer and food service. With reliable financials underneath the business, she can decide where to push and where to hold.
“Both trust and then the implementation of the trust is so important. It’s crucial.”
— Gwendolyn Dare Hageman, Owner and Founder
Security, not just bookkeeping
For a bootstrapped founder, the deeper need was security. Gwendolyn had once faced a bill she could not cover, and she never wanted to feel that again. Trusted numbers gave her the footing to stop spinning her wheels.
“I’ve experienced that as a founder of having something to pay and not having the money to pay it and I never wanted to feel that again… having that sense of security is important to me.”
— Gwendolyn Dare Hageman, Owner and Founder
With clean books and clear margins, Darë Vegan Cheese is building its next chapter on numbers it can trust.
