Parents are inclined to listen to the demands of their children and rightly so because sometimes it might be the start of something new. It is up to the parent to make the final decision though, and one mother in Virginia bought a lemon squeezer at the request of her son who now runs his own lemonade business at the age of 11.
Aubrie Green is a young entrepreneur with autism who wanted to follow in his little brother’s footsteps. His younger brother has a cooking thing going on for him, but Green wanted to have his own business and it all begun with a text message to his mom.
Breezzy’s Lemonade was conceived when Aubrie sent a photo of a lemon squeezer for sale at Bed Bath & Beyond on a discounted price to his mother, Ceydria McCray.
“Aubrie ended up sending me a picture of a lemon squeezer,” McCray said. “It was at Bed Bath & Beyond on sale for $19.99 and he asked me to grab it up and I did.”
This budding young entrepreneur started working on his perfect lemonade recipes immediately the squeezer got home.
His first patronizers were his mother’s colleagues. McCray wanted a second opinion on the flavors of the drink and sent samples to work and the drink was an instant hit. At first, she sent the flavors in cups, then moved to pouches, jugs then to bottles; Breezzy’s Lemonade was born.
“They requested gallons,” McCray said to ABC 8 News. “We ended up getting cups, from cups to pouches, pouches to jugs that I was getting at the dollar store and now we got sealed bottles.”
Now, knowing they had a market for the lemonade, Green created an Instagram account with the support of his family and started selling from there.
The orders kept coming and a local grocery store in his hometown Richmond, Virginia, The Market at 25th, made an offer to the 11-year-old to sell his lemonade on their shelves.
The products are almost always sold out all the time because customers love them, forcing Green to stock up more frequently which was good for his business at the end.
“It’s a really fast-moving product and people want it. It was really impressive when it first came in and people were coming in asking where it was, but it was already gone,” Derek Houston, business analyst at The Market at 25th, told the local news outlet.
As an autistic child making the lemonade from scratch, this is more than a business for Green; it is therapeutic to him.
His mentor Earl Hughes credits the success of his business to his unique way of thinking because he has learned to overcome autism in his own special way.
“It’s wonderful to see kids like Aubrie grow. They’ll say autism, they’ll think it’s a disability. Every kid excels in different ways,” Hughes said.
“This lemonade was never intended to be sold, it’s therapeutic,” McCray explained. “Aubrie rolls every lemon before he squeezes it, after he cuts and squeezes it he free-throws it into a bucket.”
Green is the definition of dedication, passion, and hard work because dreams should not remain dreams, it is up to us to make them a reality.
“That just goes to show when you find something you love, you do it. With his mind, he found something he loved and he’s creating something,” McCray said.
Breezzy’s Lemonade now sells flavors such as plain jane, grade-ade, tango mango, striker and dragon fruit and intends on introducing tastier flavors soon.
