Dough-Versity Donuts closes after one year

Dough-Versity Donuts has permanently closed after being open for less than one year.

Dough-Versity opened last year on June 1, which is National Doughnut Day, but closed at the end of the spring semester.

In December 2018, Kim Lim purchased the store from the previous owner, David Bryan, and has been running the business since then. Before then, Lim and Bryan were business partners and worked together.

"It was a seasonal [business] for us in that location," Lim told The Student. "A lot of students go home, and we have no traffic in the store. We only had a few regular customers who were not students, but not enough to keep business up."

Lim had also recently opened Daylight Doughnuts, another doughnut shop, in Richmond, Indiana. Lim said he had difficulty managing both Dough-Versity and Daylight Doughnuts.

Since Dough-Versity was a seasonal business, Lim said that to turn a profit, both he and Bryan needed to work the store.

There is another doughnut store in town called Oxford Doughnut Shoppe, and Lim attributed Dough-Versity's closing in part to its competition.

"I really liked [Dough-Versity], but I get why they closed," junior Erika Nolan said. "I thought it was very cute, and the people I interacted with in the store were friendly. I am sad to see it go."

Lim said that the storefront of Dough-Versity was quite small, so the doughnuts were not made in store but rather shipped to the shop daily from three doughnut shops: Square Donuts of Richmond, Indiana, Donut Haus in Springboro and Bear Creek Donuts in Miamisburg.

The doughnuts were "transported 30-45 minutes and delivered to Dough-Versity's shelves, meaning the selection of doughnuts [were] a carefully curated collection of their favorite doughnuts," Bryan told the Journal-News.

Bryan believed that Dough-Versity's core business would be students and those who walked Uptown. He grew up in Oxford, loving the sense of community and diversity, according to the article.

Bryan told the Journal-News that Dough-Versity was a family operation, until business partner Lim took over, and that he saw a good future for the business, which had been several years in the making.