Slutty Vegan made the news when its location at Spelman College closed on February 26th and was replaced with Twisted Taco. According to Eater, the restaurant gave the College two days’ notice before its closure; now we know why. In an exclusive interview with People, Slutty Vegan restaurant founder Pinky Cole reveals that she made the difficult decision to relinquish control of the multimillion-dollar company to an assignee (who closed the Spelman location and others). Then, she had a freak car accident where a mattress flew into her windshield and smashed it while she was driving on an Atlanta highway at 70 mph. “It was like Final Destination,” she said. “I’m not the person to get in accidents, and I wasn’t on the phone. I wasn’t texting.”
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A Rough 2024
Cole describes 2024 as a rocky year. She told People, “Our corporate overhead was about $10 million,” Pinky stated. “I was chasing something that I couldn’t catch for so many reasons.” Though she knew the fast-food chain was special and connected to a large audience — famous for consistently having hours-long queues — the corporate spend was too much for the entrepreneur to catch up with, calling it “a situation where something is just too far gone,” in which “the best thing that you could do is let it die so that you can rebirth it.”
Admitting that she wasn’t an operational person, Cole said she had people in place who ran the business side. But she learned that she could never take her hands off the wheel.
Putting Slutty Vegan in the Hands of an Assignee
Slutty Vegan needed to go through a restructuring and although Cole fought it for a long time, she decided that she had to do it in early February of this year. According to People. “I fought it for a long time, to be honest, and I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to face the public scrutiny,” she confessed. “I didn’t want to face the opinions of others because I know I built something that’s so doted by so many people. I could have easily gone to social media and did a rally cry for help, but I didn’t want to be a victim.”
She’s No Stranger to Failure
The 37-year-old entrepreneur wrote a book for entrepreneurs entitled “I Hope You Fail.” Cole also lost her first restaurant to a grease fire in 2016, has been evicted, and had her car repossessed. She considers herself an expert at failing.
However, having a mattress thrown at her caused Cole to think about how she wanted to do business in the future. She hired a headhunter to find new leadership for the company, under the banner, “Ain’t Nobody Coming to See You, Otis LLC,” 1998 film The Temptations.
The Future of Slutty Vegan is Global
Cole told People she wants to “hyper scale” Slutty Vegan 2.0. There are currently eight locations in the United States—five in Georgia and one each in Alabama, Maryland, and New York. “Global expansion is big for 2.0,” she revealed. “We’ve been talking about Dubai and Africa and just really scaling Slutty Vegan beyond the U.S.”
When she talked about her business journey she told the magazine, “There’s going to be a couple of left turns that you’re going to make, you’re going to make a couple of U-turns. There’s going to be some speed bumps in the road,” she said of her business journey. “Somebody’s going to throw a mattress at you — but that is not reason enough to give up.”
