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How cotton candy coaxed Stephanie Dougherty out of the corporate world and into a business of her own

By Sarah Sole / Photos by Jen Brown

Story Design by Atlas Biro

Though Stephanie Dougherty spent nearly 17 years in a corporate career, deep down, she always knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur.

“I always wanted to own my own business,” she said. “I just always felt like there was something else out there that I could do.”

Dougherty dreamed of joining the event industry or working with children. Scrolling through her Instagram feed one day in 2021, she discovered a way that she could do both: A cotton candy cart.

“The minute I saw it, I was like ‘oh my gosh, that’s it,’” Dougherty said.

Started in May of 2021, Dougherty’s Cotton Sugar Co. candy cart has proved to be extremely popular–so much so that the Grandview Heights entrepreneur wants to build a staff to allow her to cater multiple events simultaneously.

Her very first summer found Dougherty booked solid via Instagram and word of mouth. After just a year, she was able to resign from her corporate job and focus on Cotton Sugar Co. full time. →

“It feels really freeing,” she said. Though the flexibility entrepreneurship affords is a definite benefit of her line of work, Dougherty’s favorite part of her job is creating her cotton candy flavors from scratch. Working out of 1400 Food Lab, she hand mixes extracts, oils, and sugars the day before each event. Her personal favorite is key lime. Customers love blue raspberry and birthday cake, among others. Hot cocoa and lemonade are seasonal favorites, while champagne is popular at weddings and wedding showers.

Dougherty also recently began offering Glitter Puffs for purchase on her website, dome containers that can be dropped into a beverage to change its color and make it sparkle. →

Customers can choose from over 30 flavors of cotton candy, and the number of flavors they can offer to their guests varies upon the event’s duration: For a one-hour event, customers can choose two flavors of unlimited cotton candy.

While Dougherty occasionally can be found at farmers markets and other community events, hourly bookings make up about 90% of her business. She can be found at birthday parties, high school and preschool graduations. This year, she’ll be attending her very first quinceanera. Her cotton candy cart is popular with adults as well: Cotton Sugar Co. caters plenty of weddings, baby showers, house warming parties, and more.

“I even did a combo 50th/70th party for a daughter and father this year,” she said. “For in-person events I spin fresh cotton candy, and I hand mix the sugar myself fresh for each event. I’m up to over 30 flavors and counting now.”

Now that she’s no longer in the corporate world and invested in Cotton Sugar full-time, Dougherty wants to build on her business with more events at schools and corporations to fill her weekdays as well as her weekends. And that’s a sweet thing for Columbus.

“I’m really proud of what we accomplished,” she said. “I’ve just felt really, really supported by the people who have helped me.” ♦

To book the Cotton Sugar Co. mobile cart for your next event, go to cottonsugarco.com

Hungry for more? Scan the QR code below to see the companion video for this story.

Think of an upscale night out or a romantic night in, and you think of…bottled cocktails? No? Italian Village resident Shannon Keeran and XXI Martinis are out to change that, with an espresso martini that’s turning heads across the country.

This Columbus product’s story actually starts in Las Vegas. Keeran spends enough time at the Bellagio resort that he’s gotten to know the staff pretty well over the years. One night about six years ago, exhausted and jetlagged after a late flight, he walked into the resort’s Club Privé and asked the head bartender, Angelo Botley, for a “pick-me-up” drink. →

What Keeran expected was vodka and Red Bull, or something similar. What Botley handed him was something completely different: A decadent, beautifully caffeinated espresso martini.

Keeran was struck by the gesture. “It was so good. I told him that night, ‘We’re going to bottle this one day,’” he recalled. And he intended to make good on that promise.

But for the time being, he kept that idea on the back burner. Then…well, we all know what happened three years ago. (Hint: It involves a pandemic.) And we all know how most American adults responded to the stress and isolation of being stuck at home: By drinking.

“Nobody was going out. In-home consumption was up something like 600 percent,” Keeran said. “I own six other businesses. They were on cruise control and weren’t requiring a lot of my time right then.” He realized the time was right to jump.

He called Botley and said “I want to bottle your recipe.” And, on New Year’s Eve 2020, at the resort, the pair launched a new company, XXI Martinis.

Creating a quality prebatched drink isn’t as easy as it sounds. First, even a “perfect” recipe has to be perfected, and then, there’s an even bigger challenge: changing a handcrafted cocktail into something that can be mass-produced with no loss of quality. →

“Developing all that took us twelve months,” Keeran said. Advisors told them it would cost the same to create one flavor or five, so they went with four, including chocolate and chocolate peppermint—but the espresso martini remains the flagship, outselling the other flavors 4 to 1.

The team signed a contract to distill at Middle West Spirits in Columbus, and in March 2022, distribution began in Nevada and Ohio, with Kentucky, Georgia, and Massachusetts not far behind. “We launched where we had great connections,” Keeran said. “It’s our goal in 2023 to be in 30 states.”

Around here, that means you can find XXI Martinis in about 45 different locations, in a mix of onpremise and retail shops.

Other than being a bottled cocktail made locally, what makes this martini special? For one, the company uses all-natural ingredients, including premium espresso and premium vodka. Plus, you get that pick-me-up feeling that originally caught Keeran’s attention. “If you were to go to Starbucks and get a tall coffee, you get about 78 mg of caffeine. If you drink one of our 4 oz espresso martinis, you would get just about the same amount,” he said.

So if you’re in the mood for something luxurious, to beat the chill of winter or celebrate Valentine’s Day in style, and you think it means an investment of time, money, or effort, think again. This bottled cocktail might be the way to go, after all. ♦

To learn more, visit xximartinis.com