“I feel like the pivot queen,” says businesswoman and hemp/cannabis activist Taylon Breanne, whose most recent reinvention took place as 2024 rolled into 2025. On Friday, Jan. 3, she and business/life partner Aislinn Dugan announced on social media the launch of Oui’d, the parent company for several linked ventures, including a mobile bar and events company.
The Oui’d Bar focuses on providing alcohol-free, adaptogen-infused beverages for weddings and other events, as well as festivals and pop-ups. As a mobile operation, its services and products vary depending on the laws in the state where each event takes place.
“Alcohol-free has really been trending, even before the most recent warnings about cancer,” Breanne says. “But people still want the social effects of alcohol. Adaptogens are a health-forward alternative, and Oui’d creates an elevated social experience without the morning after. “
Adaptogens, she explains, are any kind of herb or mushroom that allows the body to adapt to stress and counterbalance the hormones released by stress. Lion’s mane mushrooms and turmeric, for example, are anti-inflammatory and combat inflammation caused by stress.
In 2018, Breanne started her first Asheville-based business, Simply Extract, a botanical extraction company creating hemp and mushroom products for clients under their own labels. In 2022, she relocated the laboratory into the back room of Carolina Hemp Co. on Haywood Street downtown and carved out a corner of the store to open The Pot Stirred, a café serving beverages infused with CBD and mushrooms. “Normalizing plant medicine has always been my mission.”
Breanne says The Pot Stirred did well its first year downtown. But when Carolina Hemp moved out of the Haywood Street building in the summer of 2023, Breanne and Dugan had to decide between trying to fill 8,000 square feet of space and cover the increased rent or relocating as well.
Fortuitously, a friend, artist Annie Kyla Bennett, co-founder of Art Garden in Riverview Station in the River Arts District, had an answer. “She came to us and said, ‘Let us take you in,’” Breanne recalls.
The couple built out a new Pot Stirred in the Canopy Gallery on Riverview Station’s second floor and were back in business September 2023. “That space was perfect,” Breanne says. “There were like 70 artists, RAD was booming, tourists were there for leaf season, locals were all over the greenway.”
In September 2024, Pot Stirred celebrated its one-year anniversary in the Canopy Gallery. Then Tropical Storm Helene hit, taking out the entire lower level of Riverview Station. Water rose 3 feet into the second floor, and all of The Pot Stirred’s inventory and equipment were destroyed.
“I was just kind of feeling done, so tired of all these big things happening — COVID, losing our downtown space, Helene — and having to pivot over and over,” Breanne says. “I took a few months to grieve and realized I just couldn’t give it up.”
She and Dugan focused on an idea they had long batted around for a mobile approach to the business, discussing ways to execute and introduce it as well as how to brand it. They decided to go for something totally new, embracing a business name that’s another play on words with a fun, flirty, French flair. The pair created a selection of a la carte experiences — adaptogen bar, flower bar and edibles bar — built a website and on Jan. 3 went live on Facebook and Instagram.
Less than a week later, The Oui’d Bar had booked its first event serving 200 attendees of a women’s business conference at Massachusetts Institution of Technology. Breanne says the business has also scheduled work at some local weddings and is applying to vend at spring festivals. The mixology service travels — its drinks, extracts and other supplies plus a 6-foot-wide collapsible bar can fit inside a minivan; at the event site, they style and dress the bar to suit the occasion. Oui’d will soon debut a line of canned adaptogen drinks they intend for national distribution.
“I feel like I’m always tossing a spaghetti noodle onto the wall to see what sticks,” Breanne says with a laugh. “The timing and the reception we’ve already gotten to Oui’d makes me feel like we have something sticky here.”
For more information, visit avl.mx/ego.
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