LITTLE ROCK’S VANTAGE POINTS
May 26 - June 1, 2014
By Becca Bona
When asked about hobbies, Sydney Brazil, 16-year-old E-stem student, said, “I guess I’m a normal teenager,” as she detailed her interests of surfing the Internet, reading and dancing. However, this teen is anything but normal and has illustrated this in her latest venture, The Hole Thing, an up-and-coming gourmet donut holery that calls Arkansas’ Capital City home.
The idea grew out of class project, a G-60 pitch, in which one prepares a business idea to be presented to possible investors in the timespan of 60 seconds. For her individual project, she presented The Hole Thing.
But she believes the real inspiration goes back further in her childhood.
Growing up, there was a donut shop down the street from her house. “We’d always go and we knew the people who worked there,” she explained. Brazil often found herself taking pink icing from full donuts and adding them to her favorite item: the holes. She believes the idea was there all along.
“One day I was talking to my mom in the car, and I said, “‘Mom, why don’t they have a variety donut hole shop?’”
Her mother agreed, and suggested that she run with the idea, call it The Hole Thing, and present it in her Noble Impact class. So, she did like any motivated teen would, and hit the books.
Noble Impact taught her many gems that she would keep in her cap for her business, including, “You can make money and still do good, you can do social entrepreneurship, and you can be a public servant and still be a billionaire,” she explained. Coming from that perspective, Brazil pitched her idea to the class, and everyone seemed to like the idea.
It wasn’t until she later traveled to Northwest Arkansas with a small group from her class to participate in a business start-up weekend that she realized she could move forward. Although she was there with her team, the event director asked for any other pitch ideas, so she introduced The Hole Thing.
“I actually got picked to be one of the top 13 that you make actual businesses off of, and that was really exciting to me, that adults liked my idea,” she recalled.
Instead of veering from her team, however, she stuck with her group and let The Hole Thing rest. Later, when she returned home, she was fired up and ready.
“It was just a good opportunity to work through the process, and after that I got home, and I said, ‘Mom, we have to do this for real. This has to be a real thing,’” she said.
She realized she would have to have a product to truly begin business. She purchased a blue cake-pop maker and began experimenting with recipes.
“I brought them to class and it was a really weird thing, because I actually had a product in front of me,” she remembered. As she continued to create new recipes, she even ended up working at Dunkin Donuts as an afterschool gig. Initially, she took on the job to work with a friend, but then she realized she was gaining valuable customer service experience. Brazil also decided that she should research other potential holeries, after discovering that Dunkin Donuts also had a small batch of hole flavors.
“I realized that the big chains would be my biggest competition, and I thought, ‘How do I differentiate myself from these huge corporations?’” she said.
Around the same time, she and her mom were breaking ground with flavor combinations. For example, using a special recipe from her great grandfather, they were able to come up with ‘biscuit’ holes. In doing so, she was able to carve out a sweet niche.
She explained her food genre: “I’m obviously a restaurant, but I’m not a coffee shop, a bakery, or a café. I want to be known as a gourmet holery.”
Flavors include everything from Blueberry Cheesecake Muffin Holes to Mexican Hot Chocolate Holes and Pumpkin Donut Holes.
These days, she is amazed at the work that goes into the strictly business side of business. So far, she’s successfully become an LLC, and she has worked out an arrangement to use Copper Grill’s kitchen to meet food preparation codes.
“I feel like from where I was to where we actually are now, with pans in an actual kitchen, is so far away from that one little blue cake pop maker,” she laughed.
As a young business, she’s still fine-tuning the kinks, which mainly focuses on streamlining the process for ordering and obtaining a delicious hole.
Currently she’s working on a collaboration with Copper Grill in which you could get a hole for dessert on certain pre-decided days. For example, she said “On Monday you could get a Chocolate Chip Cookie Hole, with their vanilla ice cream, or Wednesdays you get a Lemon Bar Hole.”
She’s juggling that idea along with fine-tuning quantifying sales. Selling holes by the dozen might not cut it for a reasonable profit.
Undoubtedly she’ll get the kinks worked out, however, because she currently has visions of a store which she hopes to see take shape in a year.
Brazil already cultivated a strong aesthetic for the future space.
“I know that I don’t want it to just be a place to eat, I want it to be a place where you can sit down and enjoy your holes and do whatever … because I want to create a relationship like the kind I had when I was younger with the people who owned and did the Daylight Donuts down the street; they knew my name. … I want to create a community inside the store.”
To catch Sydney in action, check out her pop-up event at The Green Corner Store on South Main on June 14. In collaboration with Loblolly Creamery, The Hole Thing will be making a neighborhood debut.
For more information, find The Hole Thing on Twitter, @theholethinglr, Instagram, @theholethinglr, and at the following address: www.theholethinglr.com.
