BLYTHEWOOD – Since the word has gotten out about his Blythewood CDB/hookah and vape shop in the few months since it opened, Zane Hulwe says sales have taken off, mostly driven by repeat sales.
He says older customers come in for the CBD for joint and muscle pain, to help them relax and sleep better. Younger customers come in to purchase hookahs and tobacco
“We carry many types of CDB – gummies, powder and cartridges and a wall full of flavors to choose from,” Hulwe said. “We have lots of choices for our customers, whether they want to inhale it or drink it in tea, we have it.”
Now Hulwe’s shop is undergoing renovations for a new hangout spot that’s eagerly anticipated by his regular customers: a hookah lounge where customers can smoke tobacco through a hookah, a traditional Middle Eastern water pipe.
“I have furniture coming in from Turkey for the lounge,” Hulwe said. “It will be here in about a month or so
Hulwe grew up in Texas, but in a multi-cultural family. His father is a Texan and his mother is Moroccan. He headed east when he earned an academic full ride to the University of South Carolina. He graduated last spring with a double major in computer science and broadcast media.
For Hulwe, the final nudge to open the business was also somewhat of an outgrowth of the pandemic: With his day job as a software developer moved remote by Covid-19, he gained the schedule flexibility to pursue his dream of opening a small business alongside his regular job.
“Currently we work from home, so I had the opportunity to go ahead and set everything up,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to do something like this, so I thought I might as well do it.”
In a trend that’s been catching on around the country, hookah lounges have become a social gathering spot for young people, and Blythewood is no different: Hulwe says most of his hookah customers are in their late teens and early 20s.
At 23, Hulwe is part of that demographic, though he says the vape shop has also become popular among middle-aged people seeking to quit smoking cigarettes.
With the next closest hookah lounge nearly half an hour away in downtown Columbia, he says people who enjoy visiting this kind of establishment are glad they’ll have an option closer to home.
“I have a lot of customers who come in and who say, ‘Is it started? Did you do it?’” he says. “So, I have a lot of people who are anticipating its opening and are excited about it.”
Hookah, he says, is a cultural tradition common in the Middle East – and, since his father is Moroccan, for him there’s definitely a cultural connection.
But Hulwe’s plan for his hookah lounge is not to present an Arabian theme but to more resemble those that have become popular in American cities, with a “simplistic but modern” upscale vibe.
In creating this, he says, he’s drawing inspiration from businesses he’s visited from Charleston to Las Vegas. He expects the lounge – which will take up two-thirds of his store – to be open within a few weeks.
The cost to smoke a hookah in the lounge, once it opens, is around $20-$25.
There are also plans, he says, to add a smoothie/coffee bar in the future, though that requires a longer permitting process, which he plans to begin soon.
“It would be a place where, in the morning, you would have people come in and work on assignments or work on actual work, have a cup of coffee, grab a smoothie, and then toward midday is when you would have a different crowd, and people would be able to smoke hookah,” he says. “Then, on the weekends, there would be… either a singer or a DJ.”
Hulwe says his hope is that, going forward, working from home will continue to be the norm – but, if he has to return to an office environment, his thinks his business will be running well enough on its own by that time that he won’t have to be nearby to oversee it.
Whatever happens going forward in the commuting vs telecommuting debate as the pandemic fades, the shakeup in work styles brought about by Covid-19 gave Hulwe the opening he needed to get things moving in a positive direction.
“The whole concept of ‘work from home’… just gave me complete flexibility in what I’m able to do,” he says. “So, I just got with a couple people and happened to get the idea out there, and it quickly transformed to a concept, and the concept became reality, and here we are.”
The shop, locate at 135 Blythewood Road, in the IGA shopping center, is open from 9 – 9 p.m., Monday through Saturday and from 11 – 9 p.m. on Sundays. For more information about the shop’s products, stop by or call 254-690-0189.
