- Founders Lamont Blackwood and Camden Grubbs built OneStop to simplify event booking and spotlight local chefs, bakers, bartenders and other vendors.
- The app has over 81 vendors and 300 downloads, with recent expansion into Boston, Tampa and Northern Kentucky.
- Local businesses like Voodoo Cuisine say OneStop helps increase visibility and supports community-based economic growth.
After spending over a decade of his career in the hospitality industry, entrepreneur Lamont Blackwood decided to leverage his experience to start a new venture – one he ambitiously hopes could become the Amazon of the hospitality world.
Blackwood co-founded an event-planning business in 2021, growing it across the U.S. and internationally, including in Japan. Over time, the continual effort required to manage the company led Blackwood to explore other career options.
“As you can know, with events, it’s extremely stressful and tiring,” he said. “People see the glitz and glory. They don’t see the preparation, so in doing that, I sold my part of the company to my business partner, because I wanted to change.”
After exploring sales training and other professional paths, Blackwood returned to the hospitality industry when he met his future business partner, Camden Grubbs, who had extensive experience in Cincinnati’s culinary and corporate worlds. The duo had a shared vision of creating a digital platform that would streamline event booking.
This vision evolved into OneStop, an app that serves as a “one-stop shop” for booking local vendors such as chefs, bartenders, bakers, and florists, among others. The app consolidates fragmented services onto a single platform, enabling users to discover, compare, and book these services for events of any size, from weddings and corporate outings to birthday parties.
Blackwood emphasized to LINK nky that OneStop is entirely dedicated to showcasing local vendors and small businesses, which he considers the backbone of communities.
“We’re taking it to not continue to grow the mainstream, but like I said, to look at and grow the local vendors,” Blackwood said. “We think that this concept is not just great for Cincinnati, Kentucky, but anywhere that you go. It’s really something that helps mom-and-pop shops flourish throughout the community, because like I said, they’re the heartbeat of the city.”
After over a year and a half of behind-the-scenes work, OneStop launched on the Apple App Store in the spring of this year, followed by the Google Play Store in the summer. OneStop launched its services in Cincinnati and later expanded to other cities such as Boston and Tampa.
The app currently features over 81 vendors and has surpassed 300 downloads, according to its official website. Now, OneStop is extending its services south across the Ohio River into Northern Kentucky.
David Clifton, who operates the Independence-based food truck Voodoo Cuisine, was among the first vendors in Northern Kentucky to support the app. Clifton said that OneStop would help his Cajun-inspired food truck gain more visibility among local event planners. Moreover, it offered a convenient way to reserve his food truck for more events.
“They’re, like myself, a small business that’s trying to grow, trying to find support systems, find that niche, being willing to adjust as needed, but also remaining true to what their ideas are,” Clifton said. “I think that’s the important part.”
OneStop has worked with several Northern Kentucky entrepreneurial support organizations, such as Blue North and Newport’s Incubator Kitchen Collective, which is where Clifton said he first became aware of the service.
“The idea, I think, is, for lack of a better term, it’s really plug and play wherever you go,” Blackwood said. “There’s a need for the services. There’s a need for local vendors to grow, and honestly, we look at it as something that can also boost the economy. If we continue to get the small vendors to grow, that also means more money stays within the community and that gets spent within the community.”