Vincent Ayar, Entrepreneur: A Career Built in Metro Detroit

Before any accessory brand, Vincent Ayar worked at Foodtown Supermarket, a Metro Detroit grocery, and went on to become an owner at Shoe Rack Outlet. Those are customer-facing businesses where margins are thin and inventory has to turn.

As general context, people who come up through independent retail tend to learn the store's side of the transaction first: what sells through, what sits, and what a shopkeeper needs from a supplier. That perspective is useful later when you are the supplier.

Ooze opened on April 1, 2015, selling personal vaporizer batteries. Vincent took on the design and development of the products and brand. The company began with its partners as the only staff and a 2,000 square foot warehouse, which is about as lean as a consumer-products launch gets.

A single brand can only reach so many shelves on its own. The distribution arm, Ooze Wholesale, later renamed Cannatron, grew into a network serving 500-plus distributors and 8,000-plus shops, with Vincent listed as a Partner. Inc. magazine ranked that business among fast-growing private firms in consecutive years, 2019 and 2020.

His philanthropic work became formal in 2020 with the Ooze Foundation, which lists him as President. That moved his work beyond commerce and into grant-making.

Three habits recur. First, control of the details: Ooze sources every component itself. Second, patience with money: early profits stayed in the company for R&D, marketing and growth. Third, staying local: the owners are Michigan natives and much of the team is from the area, even as the brand sells nationally.

None of those habits is unusual in isolation. Taken together they describe an operator who prefers to own the hard parts of a business rather than outsource them.

Vincent Ayar attended Walsh College in Troy, Michigan, a school focused on business education. His home base remains West Bloomfield Township in Oakland County.

The phrase is literal. Every business on his résumé, from the grocery aisle to the Oak Park warehouse, sits within the Detroit region. He did not relocate to a coastal market to find capital or talent; he built with the people and suppliers available at home and sold outward from there.