About Night Owl Spice
Night Owl Spice is a small-batch, artisanal hot sauce brand created by Craig and Mikaela Lewis, the founders of Night Owl Circus Arts. Night Owl Circus Arts is a circus school in Johnson City, Tennessee (est. 2013). During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Craig and Mikaela launched Night Owl Spice in 2021 with the goal of doing hot sauce differently.
The Night Owl Spice Philosophy
Traditionally, hot sauce culture is shrouded in black and red designs featuring skulls, snakes, and other hyper-masculine branding. Night Owls Spice strives to forge our path by creating our own unique style of hot sauce. We believe in doing things differently.
History of Night Owl Spice
In 2020, we made the decision to shut our doors at Night Owl Circus Arts for six months due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. During this time, we weren’t sure if our business would survive. So, to combat our stifling anxieties, we started searching for our "Plan B Business" in case we lost everything. We decided on making hot sauce since we saw food sales and online commerce were flourishing.
In June 2020, Craig created his first hot sauce which we named "Beginner's Luck". Craig's bubbling excitement then led us to the Mountain Harvest Kitchen in Unicoi, Tennessee. There we met Lee who put us on a path of creating commercial hot sauces. It then took over a year of numerous failures and frustrations to finally arrive at our goal of a sellable hot sauce. Lee stuck with us, and we can't thank her enough!
About Craig
Craig has been an entrepreneur for as long as he can remember. He started his first business as a mobile DJ at age 13 in 2003, and he still operates that business today. In 2013, he graduated from ETSU with a Bachelors in Digital Media, and that same year he and Mikaela founded Night Owl Circus Arts. In 2015, he founded a Software As a Service (Saas) business called CircusDB, which provides studio management software to other circus schools.
Craig has always loved to cook in his free time. He especially enjoys cooking diverse international cuisines from around the world. When the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic began, all of his businesses completely shut down overnight. With nothing but time on his hands, he took his cooking hobby up a notch. One of his many home creations during lockdown was a bottled hot sauce. He began making it for friends, and pretty soon he had people dropping by to pick up free hot sauce from his porch almost every day. That's when Craig and Mikaela knew it was time to start their next business venture!
About Mikaela
With a Digital Media Bachelors and a New Media Masters, Mikaela works full-time as a professional marketer in the energy and broadband world. In her free time, she helps Craig with Night Owl Circus Arts and runs the circus merchandise brand, Cirque Regalia.
After getting into product-based commerce with Cirque Regalia, Mikaela has grown to love the niche world of product marketing. When Craig expressed an interest in making hot sauce, she was more than ready to build him his own hot sauce empire.
All Night Owl Spice's artwork and marketing is created by Mikaela.
