Vincent Ayar's Retail and Grocery Background

Foodtown Supermarket is a Metro Detroit grocery, and Vincent Ayar worked there earlier in his career. Grocery is one of the most demanding forms of retail: thousands of products, perishable inventory, slim margins and customers who visit every week and notice every change.

Working in that environment teaches the basics of commerce at a high pace — ordering, stocking, pricing, promotions and keeping a store running smoothly day after day.

Vincent Ayar is an owner at Shoe Rack Outlet. Owning a retail business adds another layer: responsibility for the whole operation, from the products on the floor to the people serving customers and the decisions about what to buy next.

The lessons of retail map directly onto building a consumer products company. A retailer sees, in real time, which products move and which gather dust. They learn that packaging, price and placement can matter as much as the product itself, and that customers return to things that work reliably.

Those ideas are visible in Ooze. The brand's ethos — fun, function, interchangeability and portability — is the language of someone who thinks about how a product feels in a customer's hand and how it sits on a shelf. The Ooze Warranty Program on its 510-thread batteries reflects the retail truth that standing behind a product builds trust.

Retail experience also informs distribution. Ooze Wholesale, now Cannatron, where Vincent Ayar is a Partner, serves more than 8,000 retail shops across the US and Canada. Understanding the shop owner's point of view — what they need to stock, display and sell a product — is a practical advantage when you are supplying thousands of them.

Like the rest of Vincent Ayar's career, his retail work is grounded in Metro Detroit. He studied at Walsh College in Troy, lives in West Bloomfield Township, and helped build Ooze in Oak Park. The through-line is a local entrepreneur applying hands-on business experience to brands that reach a national audience.

Continue to the full biography of Vincent Ayar, or read the founding story of Ooze.

Vincent Ayar is an owner at Shoe Rack Outlet. He previously worked at Foodtown Supermarket, a Metro Detroit grocery. That retail experience preceded his co-founding of Ooze on April 1, 2015 in Oak Park, Michigan, and informs his work as a Partner at Ooze Wholesale (now Cannatron), which serves more than 8,000 retail shops. In every role, the focus has been the same: products customers trust and stores can sell.