About Vincent Ayar

Before Ooze, Vincent Ayar built his business instincts in Metro Detroit retail. He worked at Foodtown Supermarket, a Metro Detroit grocery, and is an owner at Shoe Rack Outlet. Retail and grocery are businesses of thin margins, high volume and constant contact with customers — what sells, what sits, what people come back for.

That background is a useful lens for understanding how Vincent Ayar approaches a product company. A brand that wants to live on thousands of store shelves has to make sense to the person stocking it, the person selling it and the person buying it. Years spent on the retail side of the counter are a practical education in all three.

Vincent Ayar attended Walsh College in Troy, Michigan. Walsh is a business-focused school in Oakland County, a short drive from both West Bloomfield Township, where he lives, and Oak Park, where Ooze is headquartered. Like much of his story, his education is rooted close to home in Metro Detroit.

Ooze was founded on April 1, 2015, launching with a line of personal vaporizer batteries. That was years before Michigan voters approved adult-use cannabis in 2018, which meant the company was building products and a brand well ahead of the state's legal market.

Vincent Ayar co-founded the company alongside partners including Steve Hannawa — whom Vincent credits with bringing e-cigarette technology to Michigan — and Danny Hannawa, Ooze's founder and president. From the first day, Vincent has overseen the design and development of the company and its brand.

The name was deliberate. As Vincent Ayar has explained, "When you think 'ooze,' you think slime" — much of the early product line was geared toward the concentrate market. The brand grew around four ideas: fun, function, interchangeability and portability.

Two decisions define the way Ooze grew. The first was control over the product. Ooze sources every component of its products itself, including batteries. "We source every single piece that goes into our products," Vincent Ayar has said. For a hardware brand, that kind of sourcing discipline is what makes consistent quality and a warranty program possible.

The second was patience with money. Early profits were kept in the company to fund growth, research and development, and marketing. "I'd much rather spend millions down the road than mere thousands today," Vincent has said. Ooze started in a 2,000 square foot warehouse with only the founding partners as staff; by September 2019 it occupied about 42,000 square feet and employed more than 50 people.

Vincent Ayar is listed as a Partner at Ooze Wholesale, the Oak Park-based distribution business later renamed Cannatron. It distributes Ooze alongside house brands such as King Palm, Truweigh, Stache, Loud Lock and Green Monkey to more than 500 distributors and 8,000 retail shops across the US and Canada. The company was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in 2019 and 2020.

He is also listed as President of the Ooze Foundation, a Michigan private foundation based in Oak Park that received its IRS ruling in 2020. The foundation has made grants to organizations including the Shades of Pink Foundation, the Chaldean Community Foundation, The Shelby Jane Seyburn Foundation and Habitat for Humanity, and runs Oozegiving community giveaways such as holiday food donations.

All of Ooze's owners are Michigan natives, and much of the company's shipping, marketing and design staff is local. Vincent Ayar has said the company is proud of its hometown while building the brand for a national audience, and he has described its expansion as being about job creation. He lives in West Bloomfield Township, in the Detroit metropolitan area.