College business owner plans to make Sienna Wings a million dollar brand

ByAsia Armour, Community Impact

Monday, February 17, 2025

Teen CEO featured on 'Shark Tank' opens first restaurant

This 19-year-old CEO featured on 'Shark Tank' has opened her first restaurant, Sienna Wings, in Missouri City!

MISSOURI CITY, Texas -- Tyla Simone Crayton was just 16 years old when she started a fully-staffed business, selling chicken wings she and a small staff of high school students prepared with a sauce she developed herself, she said.

After earning national recognition with a 2024 Restaurant Royalty title from PepsiCo's Dig In program, and just months away from graduating with a degree from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley-Crayton now sets her sights on investing into the Sienna Wings brand and making a million dollars, she said.

The video featured above is from a previous ABC13 Localish report.

How it started

Sienna Wings opened at grocery store Harvest Market Sienna in Missouri City in summer 2023, Crayton said, but it grew from a home-based business that started in 2017.

Crayton began taking all her classes online in the 2018-19 school year to spend more time marketing Sienna Sauce, and still graduated in 2021. Even as a high school student, Crayton said she understood the value of her time.

"That's the first thing, and then advocating for yourself in any environment is the second thing," she said. "Because you've got to use the system to your advantage. You can't just play the cards that are handed to you."

Respecting the craft

When Crayton returns to work at Sienna Wings full time in September, she said she will focus on doing pop-ups at H-E-B multiple times a week and expand the restaurant's business hours both earlier and later.

"I might have to come here and show up by myself, but that's okay," she said. "I'm setting weekly goals and just really grinding."

Though she will prioritize growing the Sienna Wings brand in the Houston-area, Crayton plans to establish an eatery-which sells chicken wing combos with macaroni and cheese and french fries, as well as full bottles of her signature Sienna Sauce-in California one day.

The inspiration

Crayton said she learned the discipline and confidence it takes to own a business by watching her mom-who, as a single parent, decided to move herself and her daughter from New York to Houston in 2005.

"I learned a lot of grit and grind and resilience from my mother and just watching her get through a lot of things," Crayton said. "When you're raised like that ... you just don't have the luxury to play around-especially being Black, and being a Black woman. ... It's like, failure is never really a choice."

This story comes from our Community Impact Newspapers partners.