Business :
My 2nd business - E-Cigarette liquid production & retail
Although I had never smoked cigarettes before, I became interested in e-cigarettes, and since by brother used to sell them, I bought one just to try it out.
E-cigarettes are straightforward devices. In the simplest mechanical form, they consist of a high-ampere battery, button, heating coil, and cotton inside it; everything connected and packed into a housing. Pressing a button closes a circuit, which heats the coil and so the cotton inside it; the cotton is soaked in e-liquid that vaporizes at high temperature.
Around a year later I started to create my own heating coils and mix my e-liquids. It was much cheaper, give a lot of space for experiments. With the time more people got interested in buying my home-made e-liquids, I’ve started selling them for a bit cheaper than in on-premise shops.
Selling them in school was really easy, all you had to do is approach some people at school’s smoking area, and offer them, and since it was cheaper than in shops, there was a lot of interest in them.
I’ve used two crucial tricks to make my e-liquids more attractive:
- All shops were limited to strengths of 18mg of nicotine in e-liquid, by law, but I’ve found a way to get strenght of 36mg, it was by shopping for business, then the limit didn’t apply to me. It was rarity for the consumer, because it was something very unpopular here.
- I had a promotion that sounded like “A person who encourages at least 3 people to buy will receive 10ml of e-liquid for free!”, some said it was stupid, but it really worked, and that got me few new clients.
E-liquids were really cheap to make on your own, for instance, 18mg/ml(the strength that was most popular) I sold for about 2$, ingredients cost me about 20 cents, so that’s 1.80$ profit, so if I sell 10 liquids it’s 18$ profit.
Operating between May 2018 and March 2020
The iconic image with prices and flavors, transferred between hundreds of people.
A little bit unrelated, but in April 2019 I have built a mechanical e-cigarette with copper tube which works to this day.