Today, we’d like to introduce you to Colin Roy. Colin was introduced to us by the brilliant and talented Justin Griffith aka Grades Of Absolute Truth.
Colin, can you walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Music has always been a huge part of my life, and I got involved in creating music pretty early on, probably towards the end of middle school. I played (bass) in a few bands, with varying degrees of success, before eventually stepping away from working directly with others and teaching myself to produce – mainly hip hop beats and drum and bass. As is turns out, collaboration is a big and necessary part of creation for me, so I found myself in the early 2000’s basically back in a “band”, though this time it was a collective of producers and MC’s. We put out a bunch of music as D.A.P., and through our connections in the drum and bass / dance music scene, started putting together shows that bridged the hip hop and drum and bass worlds. D.A.P. eventually phased out somewhere around 2005 / 2006, and one of the members (DJ Trek / Donny Benavidez) had started his own record label and was producing and releasing music under the name Poor Vida. By 2008, I had joined back up with Poor Vida, and we were signing artists to release albums, and leaning into throwing shows again to help promote our artists. It was at this time that I met Justin aka Grades Of Absolute Truth in the DFW Hip Hop scene. We clicked, and worked together on quite a few shows, eventually leading to Poor Vida putting together a national tour in 2010 (The Southern Elements Tour) featuring our own artist, MC Astro, as well as Grades Of Absolute Truth, Jackrabbit James and Kilo Art-of-Fact. At the same time we were out touring, a third member of Poor Vida, Leo J (Joel Salazar) remained in Dallas, and put together a show locally called The Elements of Hip Hop, which went on to become an annual show in Dallas featuring probably the biggest line up to date of underground hip hop artists, dancers and graffiti artists from Texas and surrounding states. I’m pretty sure Grades Of Absolute Truth was on that line up every year until we wrapped it up in I believe 2012. About that time was also where we closed up shop as Poor Vida as well, though we held onto the name and website and the publishing from all of our releases. Throughout the majority of this time, I had been working for a company called Sliquid, mostly doing graphic and web design up to this point. In 2013 my daughter was born, and I leaned further into my work at Sliquid, a personal care product manufacturer, and over the last decade managed to work my way up to Senior Vice President of this highly regarded international brand. During that time, Poor Vida didn’t do much, though there were a few things here and there. I kept my home recording studio, and did a little work there. I started a live streaming show early in the pandemic with long time friend and fellow D.A.P. member DJ System / Ryan Black, which is about to celebrate 3 years of shows. We also spun that live streaming experience into a company selling streaming and audio / video equipment, DFWStreaming.com. One other thing that came out of the pandemic was that my wife and I got into gardening a bit, and we grew a lot of different things, including some hot peppers. I started making salsa and hot sauces, and in 2022 I had posted a picture of a hot sauce I made, which got a lot of great feedback and people asking how they could get some. Very quickly, that spun up into starting a company to officially make hot sauce products, and I decided to bring back the Poor Vida name since it was sitting around not doing anything. Like I said at the beginning, music has always been a big part of my life, so it wasn’t long before I was reaching out to musicians, including Grades Of Absolute Truth about a licensing deal.
Please tell us more about your brand, Poor Vida Hot Sauce
Poor Vida is a manufacturer of hot sauces and salsas, based in Carrollton, TX. Poor Vida LLC is owned by Colin Roy and Aidan Doyle, and officially launched in 2023. We make unique flavor combinations, focused on flavor, as opposed to just trying to make the hottest pepper extract we can. We like to tell stories with our flavor combinations, and to tell the stories behind how we came up with our flavors. You can find a little back story about every product right on the product page. I am most proud of how we were able to move from a single product made at home to a full fledged, licensed manufacturer with a line of 9 different products in about 90 days. We’re on a rocket ship currently, and it’s going to be a wild ride.
Justin Griffith aka Grades Of Absolute Truth has been a great friend to us and I know you’ve got a great relationship as well. Maybe you can tell our audience a bit about Justin and your experience with them.
I kind of addressed this in the original background, but I first worked with Justin when Poor Vida was throwing hip hop events in Dallas. We clicked right away, and have collaborated on many projects over the last 15 years, from local shows to headliners, national tours, creating music and hosting more intimate type shows. You can find evidence of all of this all over Youtube. Justin is probably the most dedicated and organized person I have ever worked with, not just in music. His focus drives him, and inspires me to stay on my own A game. The Mixtape Series is a line of 5 products from Poor Vida Hot Sauce that features licensed products from musicians we worked closely with in the past, including Grades Of Absolute Truth. We worked together to come up with the flavors, including the names and the colors we were trying to hit to make a fully customized product for each artist. Something that would help to tell their story.
Website: poorvida.com
Instagram: @poorvidahotsauce
Facebook: facebook.com/poorvidahotsauce
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/poorvida
Image Credits:
Poor Vida LLC
