Vincent Ayar's Business Philosophy: Reinvest and Think Long

The line contrasts two kinds of spending. Thousands today is what partners might take out of a young company as income. Millions down the road is what a larger company can deploy once it has grown. Choosing the second means accepting less in the near term in exchange for a bigger platform later.

For Ooze, that choice coincided with the jump from a 2,000 square foot warehouse to about 42,000 square feet and a staff of more than 50 by September 2019.

Three areas are named: growth, R&D and marketing. Growth means space, inventory and people. R&D, in a hardware brand, means new product formats and better components. Marketing means making a name recognizable in shops across the country.

Each of these compounds. A wider catalog gives retailers more reasons to stock the brand, and a better-known brand makes each new product easier to sell.

A second principle is control. Ooze sources every component that goes into its products, including the batteries. Doing so takes more effort than buying finished goods from a supplier, but it lets the company stand behind what it sells, which is the premise of the Ooze Warranty Program.

Vincent has framed the company's expansion in terms of job creation, and much of the shipping, marketing and design staff is from Metro Detroit. At the same time the brand is built for customers nationwide. The philosophy is not either-or: hire close to home, sell everywhere.

As general context, many small consumer brands are funded by outside investors and grow on borrowed money or equity. Self-funding through retained profits is slower at first but keeps ownership with the founders. It also forces discipline, because every expansion has to be paid for by sales the company has already made.

Strip away the specifics and the approach reduces to a few portable ideas. Treat early profit as fuel rather than reward. Keep the parts of the business that define quality under your own control. Grow in place when the team you have is the advantage. These are not secret formulas; the hard part is sticking with them during the lean years, which is what the 2015 to 2019 growth suggests the Ooze partners did.