Aisha “Pinky” Cole is a self-described marketing genius.

The Baltimore native teased plans to open a branch of Slutty Vegan in her hometown for two years before the chain restaurant actually arrived.

A 2023 press conference to announce she would help anchor the city’s burgeoning Baltimore Peninsula development with two eateries featured a marching band and remarks from Mayor Brandon Scott. The same year, she was quoted in a New Yorker profile as saying “I am going to be bigger than Oprah.”

Cole was set to be not just a tenant, but a development partner in the Rye Street Market where Slutty Vegan and Bar Vegan, its sister sit-down spot, are located. Project developer MaryAnne Gilmartin praised Cole as “the embodiment of what this project represents.”

But behind the scenes, Slutty Vegan was in trouble. “The ship was sinking,” Cole said, and crippled by $20 million in debt. She said she lost the business to her creditors, buying back only the name and branding as well as some of the locations, including those in Baltimore.

Since then, Cole has been public about the company’s struggles, using them to emphasize her own resilience. On April 2, she told her million Instagram followers that she no longer owned the company — but then introduced herself as “the new owner” of the brand. She gave interviews to People magazine and talk show host Tamron Hall about what she’s reimagined as “Slutty Vegan 2.0.”

In June, she swung by her Maryland restaurants as part of a multi-stop brunch tour, sharing candid insights from her latest brushes with disaster. “I don’t just speak to the successful entrepreneur,” she said. “I speak to the struggling entrepreneur.”

But despite Cole’s optimism, Slutty Vegan has downsized and changed its operations in some significant ways. Once a brand on the rise with 14 locations across the country, it has slimmed down to six. In addition, two locations of Bar Vegan closed in Georgia; the branch in Baltimore Peninsula is the only remaining one.

Gilmartin declined to be interviewed for this article, but Baltimore Peninsula spokesperson Lauren Cummins said the area is “excited to host Pinky’s first hometown restaurants here in our growing community. Her unwavering resilience and infectious energy truly capture the spirit of Baltimore.”

Cole, a former reality TV producer, has long demonstrated a talent for making lemonade from life’s proverbial lemons. In 2016, she lost her first restaurant to a grease fire. She said the event, recounted in her self-help book “I Hope You Fail,” helped pave the way for greater, future success.

She began Slutty Vegan as a ghost kitchen in Atlanta in 2018, gathering long lines and celebrity endorsements. Brick and mortar shops and rapid expansion soon followed.

In 2022, investment funds from Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer and Richelieu Dennis purchased a combined 25% stake in the business for $25 million. With the infusion, Slutty Vegan was said to be worth $100 million. That deal was negotiated by Slutty Vegan’s chief revenue officer, Jason Crain, who was later promoted to company president. Crain declined to comment for this story.

While Cole has always been the public face of Slutty Vegan, she said she stepped away from the business’s day-to-day operations in 2021 to become a mom. She has three young children with husband Derrick Hayes, the CEO of Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks. “I wasn’t on the calls every day,” she said.

She said that when she refocused on the business last year, it was in financial peril. Some of the struggles stemmed from high overhead, including steep travel costs for top executives and ballooning construction costs post-pandemic, she said. Each new location Slutty Vegan was opening cost more to build. While sales were strong at individual locations, Cole said, “the money went fast.”

Slutty Vegan is far from the only chain affected by a tough economic outlook. Many businesses have struggled with soaring food and labor costs coupled with a decline in sales as more customers have stayed home. Last year saw a surge in restaurant bankruptcies, according to the publication Restaurant Business, with titans of the industry including Red Lobster and TGI Fridays seeking debt protection through the courts.

To patch the holes, Cole said, she decided to fire the company’s entire C-suite last year. She sold off Slutty Vegan’s $10 million real estate portfolio, including a property in Washington, D.C., where she’d been planning to open a new location, she said.

Cole said that, at the urging of her investors, she rushed the opening of her Baltimore Peninsula restaurants to “stop the bleeding” and drive more revenue. “I would never do that again.” Both Bar Vegan and Slutty Vegan were understaffed and unable to keep up with customer demand. “Here you have a company that is drowning in debt,” she said, “and I have to lay off people. Everyone is overworked and tired … obviously things are going to get missed.”

It still wasn’t enough to stay solvent. Earlier this year, Slutty Vegan went through a financial restructuring, and Cole surrendered control of the company to a trustee. She formally resigned from Slutty Vegan’s board and stepped down as CEO. During the restructuring, Slutty Vegan’s creditors closed several branches, including ones at Spelman College, Georgia Tech and in Harlem, New York. Much-hyped expansions in D.C. and at the Atlanta airport were called off.

A previously announced location in Baltimore’s Northwood Commons never opened. Earlier this year, developer MCB Real Estate filed a lawsuit against Slutty Vegan for approximately $40,000, alleging failure to pay rent. A judge later denied the developer’s petition for a warrant of restitution on procedural grounds. A spokesman for MCB Real Estate declined to comment on the case.

Cole said she was eventually able to buy back the Slutty Vegan name and intellectual property under her new entity, Ain’t Nobody Coming to See You, Otis LLC, along with some locations. She declined to reveal how much she paid for these assets, but clarified she no longer owns Slutty Vegan in the same form as before. “I don’t own the company anymore,” she said. “I don’t have any relation to Slutty Vegan, Inc.” Meyer‘s and Dennis' firms are no longer invested in the company, according to their respective websites.

In recent months, Cole has hired a new president, Lauren Maillian, and a new head of HR, Sandra L. Jean. With fresher and more experienced blood in place, the slimmed-down version of Slutty Vegan “feels like something totally new,” she said. And with its founder back in the driver’s seat handling day-to-day operations, Cole said the company is poised for success.

Jean said in a statement that she plans to tighten aspects of Slutty Vegan’s operations, including its onboarding programs and performance management systems, all with the goal of improving both worker morale and customer service. “The outlook is truly magnifique!”

Cole also has her eyes set on new frontiers of business, exploring possible locations in London as well as in Africa. She even opened a new location of Slutty Vegan in Florida. Amid the tumult at Slutty Vegan this year, she founded another business, Voagies, a vegan sandwich shop that she compared to Jersey Mike’s. “There’s nothing like it,” she said.

Not all of her troubles are in the rearview mirror. In April, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cole is embroiled in a dispute about whether she must pay money under a settlement agreement to end a lawsuit over alleged unpaid wages from employees at a now-shuttered branch of Bar Vegan. Cole said she does not owe the funds because she didn’t own an interest in the restaurant.

Cole, who noted that she doesn’t have a business degree, said her experience with the restructuring offered an invaluable lesson in the world of commerce. “I‘ve learned so much in business just by going through these changes, things that I didn’t know when I first started. I didn’t know about equity, safe notes, private equity firms,” she said. Now things are on the right track, she said, adding that there are now new managers, new menus and sales are increasing week over week at Slutty Vegan and Bar Vegan in Baltimore Peninsula.

“People love the ambience, love the space, love the food,” Cole said. “The noise has calmed down.”

She’s feeling optimistic about the area and her partnership with MAG Partners, with whom she’s worked to recruit additional tenants to the development. “We are committed to making Baltimore Peninsula the place to be,” she said. “I’m excited about what the future has to hold.”

Cole hopes that speaking honestly about her experience will give encouragement to other small-business owners. “None of this is failure,” she said. “I’m only stronger because of this hiccup.”