Vincent Ayar Timeline: Ooze and Related Milestones

Undated, but earlier than 2015: Vincent Ayar worked at Foodtown Supermarket in Metro Detroit and became an owner at Shoe Rack Outlet. He attended Walsh College in Troy, Michigan. Exact years for these are not published, so this timeline leaves them undated.

Ooze opens in Oak Park, Michigan, with a line of personal vaporizer batteries. The partners are the entire staff, working out of a 2,000 square foot warehouse. From this first day Vincent oversees design, development and brand.

In these years the company focuses heavily on concentrate users, the audience that inspired the name, while expanding toward products for flower users. Early profits are reinvested in growth, R&D and marketing. Specific product launch dates are not part of the published record, so they are not listed here.

Michigan voters approve adult-use cannabis in 2018. This is context rather than a company milestone; it is included because Ooze was already three years old by then, having launched well ahead of that change.

By September 2019, Ooze occupies about 42,000 square feet and has more than 50 employees. On September 13, 2019, The Weed Blog publishes its interview with Vincent. In the same year, Ooze Wholesale is named to the Inc. list of fastest-growing private companies.

The Ooze Foundation receives its IRS ruling as a Michigan private foundation in 2020, with Vincent Ayar listed as President. Ooze Wholesale appears on the Inc. list again in 2020.

The distribution business is renamed Cannatron at a later date. It continues to supply Ooze and house brands to a network of 500-plus distributors and 8,000-plus shops across the US and Canada.

Two stretches stand out. The first four years, from the April 2015 launch to the September 2019 snapshot, are about building the company itself: space, staff and catalog. The years from 2019 onward are about what grew out of it, including outside recognition for the distribution business and the formal start of organized giving through a private foundation. Dates are included here only when they appear in published records; anything undated is labeled that way rather than estimated.