Misty Zollars

From the farmers market to a pink-walled juice bar, Misty Zollars is redefining what wellness looks like in Ojai. With disco balls, giant apples, and a menu of vibrant organic blends, her new venture, Community Juice, proves that being healthy can be as playful as it is nourishing.

Misty Zollars loves to juice. Photo by Will Nielsen.

If you’ve been to the Ojai Farmers Market lately, you may have noticed a bright, colorful stand run by a vivacious blonde ball of energy, selling juice like she’s hosting the biggest party in town. That’s Misty Zollars, founder of Community Juice—Ojai’s newest and most joyful place to get your daily dose of wellness.

Her colorful organic pressed blends, with names like Disco Juice, Beetastic, and Mr. Goodmorning, are as nourishing as they are fun. Indeed, Community Juice isn’t your average juice brand, and Zollars isn’t the stereotypical face of a fledgling wellness company. Instead of serenely posing in a sun-drenched kitchen squeezing the contents of a picture-perfect fruit bowl for Instagram, she’s running around Ojai dressed in a giant apple costume, wheeling her pink juice cart down the street. For Zollars, health doesn’t have to be rigid, and wellness doesn’t have to be dull. Her mission is to draw people in with her infectious playfulness and whimsy. “I have zero shame,” she laughs. “If being silly makes people smile and try a juice, I’m all in.”

Yet Zollars didn’t come to Ojai to start a juice company. After nearly two decades in the fashion world, she had officially stepped away from entrepreneurship to embrace motherhood. Along with her husband, the artist Logan Maxwell Hagege, the couple packed up their life in Los Angeles and moved to Ojai in late 2019, ready for a quieter, more intentional chapter. She envisioned slow mornings with her two little kids, afternoons in the backyard, and a life free from the relentless deadlines and pressures of the fashion industry. For a while, it felt perfect. But then, something shifted. “I thought I’d be totally content just being a full-time mom,” Zollars reflects. “And for a while, I was. But eventually I started thinking: ‘Wait, where did I go?’ Being a mom is fulfilling, but I realized I needed something that was mine – something creative that made me feel like me again.” That something started with a simple morning ritual: juicing.

Before Ojai, before juicing, before Community Juice was even a dream, Zollars lived and breathed fashion. Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, playing dress-up was her jam. “My great-grandmother had this bin of old vintage clothes and costume jewelry, and I would just live in it,” she recalls. “I loved how fashion could be playful; how you could transform yourself just by changing what you wore.” By the time she turned 18, Zollars knew she wanted to work in the fashion industry. While getting there wasn’t straightforward, she worked her way into the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Downtown Los Angeles and through sheer grit and determination made her dream a reality.

However, her first job in the industry was anything but glamorous. “I was literally carrying this massive suitcase full of fabric swatches around L.A., pitching textile designs to brands,” she remembers. One of her stops was at Joie, a high-end contemporary brand that had its heyday in the early 2000s. Zollars immediately clicked with the eponymous founder, Joie Rucker, who hired her as an assistant designer. That’s when her true fashion education began. “You hear these crazy stories about fashion being brutal,” she says. “They’re all true. It was even scarier than The Devil Wears Prada.”

Two years into her time at Joie, Rucker left the company, and Zollars took the leap by joining a tiny denim startup called True Religion. “My parents thought I was insane to leave a stable job to work for this no-name company,” she says. “But I believed in it.” Within a few years, True Religion exploded. Their signature jeans – with bold stitching and oversized pockets – became a celebrity staple. “It was wild,” Zollars says. “One month, we were five people, the next month, we were hiring our hundredth employee.” But rapid growth came with challenges. “The owners were going through a nasty divorce, and it got messy,” she says. “I was caught in the middle a lot. It was really stressful. But I learned so much, especially about problem-solving.”

After almost a decade at True Religion, Zollars was ready for something new. In 2014, she teamed up with her best friend and colleague, Kelly Urban, to launch AMO, a denim brand built around one simple idea: five perfect pairs of jeans designed by women, for women. “We were designing for real women,” Zollars says. “Not a male exec’s idea of what looked good on a 19-year-old supermodel. Just effortless, classic denim, driven by how women actually dress and want to feel.” While friends and family again warned Zollars against entering an already saturated market, she trusted her instincts. AMO quickly gained a cult following and grew into a thriving business.

But then motherhood changed everything, and Zollars’ priorities shifted. “Fashion was my identity for so long,” she says. “But once I had a baby, I didn’t care about it in the same way.” Leaving AMO was “terrifying, but moving to Ojai felt right.” At first, she thought she was done. Then the pandemic hit. “I had two little kids and was home all the time with no creative outlet,” she says. “It really affected me.” Juicing became her one small, daily ritual. Before long, she had more juice than she could drink. Friends tried it, then friends of friends. Soon, people were asking to buy it. Starting a juice business felt like the next step but Zollars hesitated: “I kept thinking, ‘Do I really want to start another business?’” But the idea wouldn’t leave her alone. And when a close confidant said, “You’re not losing anything by trying,” she knew it was time to leap.

For the past few years, Zollars has been building Community Juice from the ground up, creating vision boards, experimenting with flavors, renting a shared kitchen space, popping up around Ojai with her juice cart, selling at the Sunday Farmers Market, and reinvesting everything she’s made back into the business. Now, she’s taking things to the next level by opening her own brick-and-mortar shop in Meiners Oaks.

Tucked into a sunny corner of El Roblar, Community Juice is impossible to miss. Walking in feels like stepping into a bottle of juice: bright, bold, playful, and unmistakably Misty. “I wanted it to be more than just a place to shop, it’s a joyful experience,” she says. The space is vibrant with pink walls and ceilings, giant disco balls, an enormous apple-shaped fridge, and glossy checkered floors with flowers. The vibe? 1950s ice cream parlor meets Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Which of course, is the whole idea.

“What I’ve learned through this whole journey is that children’s health is really important to me,” Zollars explains. “My trick is to make it all really fun and look like an ice cream shop, just to get people through the door. And once they try the juice and it’s delicious, they hopefully realize that being healthy can also be fun.”

The menu at Community Juice features fresh-pressed blends, made with organic ingredients sourced directly from local farms. Bursting with flavor and color, the juices are delicate in texture, balanced in flavor, and packed with nutrients. Highlights include the deeply pink Super Punch, a sweet strawberry blend with pineapple and beetroot; the vibrant yellow Mr. Goodmorning, with apple, cucumber, lemon, ginger, and mint; and the sunshine-bright Disco Juice, made from apple, carrot, and orange. The lineup of green juices meanwhile includes the sweet Apple Bottom Greens, the refreshing So Fresh and So Green (just celery and lemon), and the bold and earthy Ging and Juice, which combines cucumber, celery, kale, spinach, lemon, and ginger.

Beyond juice, everything in the shop is focused on health and wellness. “The space is curated with my favorite brands and offers people one place to find everything they need to care for themselves,” says Zollars. “We have supplements, products for new mamas, books, items for the home and kitchen, healthy but fun snacks, and even fruit-shaped handbags for kids. There really is no other shop like it.” What’s more, as a certified health coach Zollars has plans to host workshops and wellness discussions in a space adjacent to the store. She lights up when she talks about helping others. “This is what I love,” she says. “Helping people feel better. And I want this to be a place for people to connect.”

What began as a simple act of self-care during the pandemic soon blossomed into a full-blown passion project, then a growing business rooted in health, creativity, and community. For Zollars, Community Juice is more than just a juice shop, more than a company, more than a brand. “It just feels right,” she beams. “I get to create, connect, and help others. And that,” she adds, “is what success is to me now.”

The Community Juice store is open Thursday through Saturday 9am to 2pm and is located at:
145 W El Roblar Dr
Meiners Oaks
CA 93023
communityjuice.com

This article was first featured in the 2025 summer edition of Ojai Magazine. You can read the online version of the magazine here.