Today we’d like to introduce you to Cole Keeton.
Cole, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
After meeting my wife Jencey, we discovered shortly after that even though we are very different – when we combine our passions interesting things result.
The first passion project we started and are still working on is our band French 75. Jencey being a classically trained pianist and singer-songwriter combined those strengths with my passion for percussion and electronic drum and bass. We feel we came up with an interesting original sound with our music, we are currently in the middle of completing our sophomore album. The same goes for our pop up mobile bar Trucky – it was her passion for hospitality coupled with my passion for automotive.
After doing these little passion projects for almost 5 years, we thought hey let’s do something big. Sweet tooth was born. We took Jencey’s background in marketing and my background in design and creative direction and starting talking about how we could produce a walk through experiential place for Dallas that’s never been done before. We started with the external piece of the experience. What’s the aesthetic going to be? So we took her obsession with all things sweet and my passion for film. All of the rooms are a combination of her favorite sweets mixed in with my favorite film directors. We then started bringing in people we wanted to work with and feature in our space. Without going into great detail… after bringing our fabrication partner ( Built by Bender ) and all of the artists ( Jeremy Biggers, Shamsy Roomiani, Chelsea Delzell, Jojo Chuang, and Rob Wilson ) we kind of formed a mini artist collective which in the end made our space so much more than it ever could’ve been.
Has it been a smooth road?
Besides taking the leap of faith and emptying our savings account it hasn’t been too bumpy. There were tons of long nights working on the space weeks before opening, the typical haters and online trolls stewing in jealousy. But overall it’s been pretty smooth and very well excepted in Dallas. In fact, it’s been so well excepted were already concepting a new space for this holiday.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Sweet Tooth Hotel story. Tell us more about the business.
Well, I am the creative director and co-founder of Sweet Tooth Hotel but so many more people have invested their lives in time to make it great, so it’s hard for me to answer the question as far as what I specialize in.
I think I am most proud of the fact that we did something and were successful with it in Dallas with a small group of creatives that other companies have done with a lot more people and millions of dollars. We put our blood sweat and tears into it and it paid off.
I think what sets us apart from any other experiential space is that not only are we not owned by a corporation or have big investors that we have to keep happy but we partnered with local artists, and I think that really gives us an advantage to being authentic. I personally don’t think you can be too authentic when you have to please a board or investors with mixed interests. It’s been important to us from day one to see our original vision through.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I would assume it will start to trend more to have instagramable experiences in more places. We are seeing it all over the world. We are just focused on making future executions completely different from what other people are doing. We have heard people comparing us to other experientials and it’s been a good learning experience. We know we have to do what hasn’t ever been done in our next space.
Pricing:
- $20 dollars for general admission
- $40 for our VIP Keyholders admission
Contact Info:
- Address: 2316 Victory Park Ln, Dallas, TX 75219
- Website: sweettoothhotel.com
- Email: hello@sweettoothhotel.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sweettoothhotel/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sweettoothhotel/
Image Credit:
Jonathan Zizzo
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