The Atlanta entrepreneur said Saturday that Voagies will inaugurate her Slutty Vegan 2.0 venture, operating out of her original Slutty Vegan storefront in West View.
ATLANTA — Pinky Cole said Saturday that she is ready to make her Slutty Vegan enterprise “bigger and better and stronger” as she detailed her recent business tribulations — briefly losing the company earlier this year — and announced her comeback with the new vegan hoagie concept shop Voagies in Atlanta.
“There was a lot of people that thought I was dead, metaphorically,” Cole said at the Voagies grand opening in West View, out of the same original storefront where she launched Slutty Vegan. “But let me tell you how even in that dirt, flowers will grow high.”
Cole said that as of February 13, she did not own her company. By March 28, she had bought it back.
The celebrated Atlanta entrepreneur explained to Forbes last month the mechanism by which she surrendered control of the Slutty Vegan company through an “assignment for the benefit of creditors.” She said she was then able to buy it back on March 28.
Cole said cash-flow issues and high corporate overhead contributed to the need for her to restructure.
On Saturday she pledged the Voagies grand opening would be the first step to making “Slutty Vegan 2.0” bigger and better.
“This is the first business in Slutty Vegan 2.0. This is a hoagie shop like you have never experienced before,” she said, adding that she’s confident Voagies will turn into a multimillion dollar brand all its own, as Slutty Vegan did. “This brand is going to scale in a way that you ain’t never seen before… We will see this all over the world.”
Cole said she’s been envisioning a vegan hoagie shop for six years, and coming out on the other side of the Slutty Vegan restructuring process inspired her to finally make it a reality.
“This concept was born because I was tired of going to sub shops and just getting veggies on bread,” she said. “I wanted to be able to create something that I could appreciate, and I knew that it was guilt free, and I knew that the market was wide open for a vegan hoagie shop. So I decided to do that… I’m so excited that this concept has finally manifested itself.”
Predicting success for Voagies in the same vein that Slutty Vegan attained — with stores across metro Atlanta and locations in New York, Dallas and Birmingham — out of the same building that Slutty Vegan got its start in, Cole said, “I don’t think it’s gonna work, I know it’s gonna work.”
“I wanna say, all the people who ever doubted me — I hope that you have a front row seat to the success,” she said. “I hope that you are sitting in VIP to all this greatness that’s happening and is about to happen.”
