This Young Entrepreneur Started The Texas Eatery Sienna Wings In Her Teens—And It’s Soaring

From her kitchen to the grocery store, Tyla-Simone Crayton has turned her Black-owned business into a growing one and looks forward to even more expansion.

According to ABC 13, Tyla opened Sienna Wings as a fully-staffed chicken wing business with high school students preparing the food with a sauce she created at the grocery store Harvest Market Sienna in Missouri City, Texas, in the summer of 2023 when she was 16 after expanding from a home-based business created in 2017.

The outlet reported that Sienna Wings claimed a 2024 Restaurant Royalty title from PepsiCo’s Dig In program. Crayton will soon graduate from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

According to Community Impact, she will return to Sienna Wings full-time in September. In addition to doing pop-ups multiple times a week, she said she would extend the restaurant’s operating hours.

“I might have to come here and show up by myself, but that’s okay,” Crayton said. “I’m setting weekly goals and just really grinding.”

Being raised by a single mother who relocated from New York to Houston in 2005 taught Crayton the necessary skills to start her own business. Crayton believes her lifestyle shaped her mindset never to give up or fail.

“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.”

While the Houston area is Crayton’s primary focus for growing the Sienna Wings brand, she also plans to open a restaurant in California.