Vincent Ayar on Building Ooze: 5 Lessons From a Michigan Brand

Ooze launched on April 1, 2015 with a line of personal vaporizer batteries. That was years before Michigan voters approved adult-use cannabis in 2018, which meant Vincent Ayar and his partners were building products, supplier relationships and brand recognition while the wider market was still taking shape.

The founding team was small. Vincent Ayar co-founded Ooze alongside partners including Steve Hannawa, whom Vincent credits with bringing e-cigarette technology to Michigan, and Danny Hannawa, Ooze's founder and president. In the beginning, the partners themselves were the entire staff.

Starting early is not a guarantee of anything. But it gave Ooze time to learn its customers and refine its products, so the brand was already established when Michigan's adult-use market opened.

One of the defining decisions Vincent Ayar describes is control over components. "We source every single piece that goes into our products," he told The Weed Blog in 2019 — including the batteries.

For a hardware brand, sourcing is where quality is won or lost. Owning that process is what lets a company stand behind what it sells, and it is why Ooze can back its 510-thread vape batteries with the Ooze Warranty Program.

That instinct has roots in retail. Before Ooze, Vincent Ayar worked at Foodtown Supermarket, a Metro Detroit grocery, and he is an owner at Shoe Rack Outlet. Retail teaches quickly that customers come back to products that work reliably — and stop buying the ones that don't.

Ooze's growth was funded patiently. Early profits stayed in the company to pay for expansion, research and development, and marketing.

"I'd much rather spend millions down the road than mere thousands today," Vincent Ayar has said about that choice.

The results show in the numbers. Ooze started in a 2,000 square foot warehouse with only the founding partners on staff. By September 2019 it occupied about 42,000 square feet and employed more than 50 people — roughly a twentyfold increase in space in about four years.

Vincent Ayar's focus at Ooze has been the product and the brand: how each item looks, how it works and how it fits into a larger system.

The name itself was deliberate. "When you think 'ooze,' you think slime," Vincent Ayar has said — much of the early product line was geared toward the concentrate market. The name is playful, memorable and easy to say, which matters for a brand competing for attention on a crowded counter.

The brand grew around four ideas — fun, function, interchangeability and portability — and those ideas run through the product line:

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.

Distribution carries that brand far beyond Oak Park. Vincent Ayar is listed as a Partner at Ooze Wholesale, now Cannatron, which supplies Ooze and 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.

The commitment to home extends to giving. Vincent Ayar is listed as President of the Ooze Foundation, a Michigan private foundation based in Oak Park that 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.

The key facts behind the Ooze story, all verified:

The story of Vincent Ayar and Ooze is less about a single breakthrough than about a set of steady choices: start early, control the product, keep money in the business, give the brand a clear personality, and stay close to home while selling everywhere.

For the full story, read the full biography of Vincent Ayar, explore the founding story of Ooze, or visit the press kit for approved bios and a fact sheet.