By Alyssa Stahr
Photos courtesy of Essex E-Liquid
The vaping industry may not be in its infancy, but it’s still young. It’s for that reason Essex E Liquid’s 2012 origins make it seem like a veteran company in the industry. In 2011, CEO Dennis Weddle was a bachelor living paycheck to paycheck, working for a sign company. He was in a motorcycle club and was staying at a friend’s house when a woman gave him the movie The Secret. He said that, as corny as it sounds, he watched the movie. He thought it was BS, but he watched it again.
“This lady was nice enough to give it to me, and I needed to watch it with an open mind,” Weddle said. “I watched it again, and what happened was, my boss couldn’t pay me, and it was right before Christmas. I did one of these little visualization things, and it kind of worked.”
Weddle ended up with the money he was visualizing right before Christmas, but he thought it was just a coincidence. He tried visualizing again, and it worked. Hoping for the trifecta, he tried to visualize what he really wanted.
“I needed to quit going just for money and going for what I really wanted. I always wanted to get paid to draw and own my own company, so I started visualizing owning a sign company,” he said.
And then, he got laid off.
That didn’t deter Weddle, and about eight years ago, after some coaxing, he started his first business. He hired a salesman, with whom he traded work at a pizzeria. He did the signs for the pizzeria, and the salesman introduced him to vaping.
“This was back with the little cartomizers and the end of the cigarette lit up; it was a long time ago,” said Weddle, who had been smoking for around 30 years, since he was 14. “I could never get enough vapor to get off cigarettes; I just couldn’t do it. I spent hundreds of dollars.”
But in 2011, Weddle knew that there had to be a better way. He started making his own e -liquid, and in 2012, one of his good friends started Vape Zombies, based in Olympia, Wash. Weddle struggled with the sign company during the “mini -depression,” and money was tight. The Vape Zombies launch prompted him to start researching vaping as a business. He was buying e liquids from other companies, and he realized that he could do better, and soon opened his first vape shop—the first one in his town in Washington State. He came up with several initial lines, along with CoolVapes.com. His first “home run hit” was a flavor called Ahola, which was his version of fruit punch.
“Of course, when you have your own vape shop, you have a testing ground to see what people like and buy,” Weddle said. “I was with my kid at Taco Bell, and he goes, ‘Dad, they have this drink called Blueberry Mountain Dew,’ and I said, ‘Let me taste this.’ And, oh, my God, I was going to make this into a flavor. That was my second home run hit; we called it Blue Dew.”
The next step in Weddle’s career happened when someone walked into his shop with a well known e- liquid brand in hand. Weddle tried it, and he thought, “This is good, but, no offense to anybody, mine was just as good as theirs was.” But, he was struck by the packaging and the branding. The lightbulb went off, and he realized that the real deal for him was to have an e-liquid company and sell wholesale.
It took Weddle a year to decide on the first six flavors for Essex.
“I drove my guys crazy,” he said. “It’s the funniest thing, because the simplest flavor out of all of them was called Girl’s Best Friend. It was just a coconut banana; I tried 37 different combinations, and once I got it, I tweaked the final five times.”
At the time, everything in the industry was racy, so Weddle based his packaging on a stripper girl with a silhouette. He moved on to hiring a CEO—someone he was working with in the sign industry. After a one -year deal was made, things really started to take off at Essex.
“With his knowledge on retail and wholesale, that really excelled my company. Once he came on board, we really started to get big. Through that we went through some pretty big changes,” Weddle said.
The changes included toning down the sexual content of his e -liquid marketing. Dealing with European markets, he had to get up to speed with warning labels. He took a look at the entire vaping industry, which was, and still is, under a lot of scrutiny, and he didn’t want anything negative. Even though some customers were used to, and even liked, the sexy names of the first line, Weddle decided to make some changes.
“We are so passionate about the industry, and we didn’t want to be negative in any way to the industry as a whole. When I had the vape shop, my average age client was, like, 40. I had 60 year- old customers who were quitting smoking and starting vaping. We really took a hard look; it was a big change for us—basically, just to be proactive with the industry,” he said. Weddle has seen some major changes in the industry since 2012. The one thing that stood out was that, back then, his No. 1 nicotine level seller was 24.
“I would not go over that. We had people wanting 36, and I held at 24 because I thought that was plenty enough,” Weddle said. “We sold more 24 than probably zero. We didn’t even have three back then—that was unheard of. When I was making e-liquid in the early days I was using a lot of nicotine.”
Times have changed, and now the No. 1 seller is 3 mg. The other change, according to Weddle, is that the industry is “inundated with juice makers.”
“When we first started, just the fact that we had a really premium, thought -out, complex e-liquid was huge. Now, you have so many of them to where there’s a real competition; there’s a lot more standup e -liquid manufacturers today,” he said.
The final big change, according to Weddle, has been with labs. His first lab was built in the back of the vape shop. It wasn’t really a “lab,” Weddle said. “It looked kind of like a lab, but it was out in the open. We made it real easy to clean everything.” Weddle said that he keeps saying “we” because of all of the people who have helped him along the way, including his employees, are like family to him. With a motto of “Live to Vape,” Essex’s new off -site lab was built by Custom Builders Innovations, and it includes a storage facility on the outside of the lab. There’s never an open container outside of the lab, and it includes an epoxy floor, fiberglass sheeting walls, a filtration system, and stainless steel shelves and tables. On a large bottling day, the facility will produce about 1,000 to 2,000 bottles.
Now, almost four years later, Essex’s most popular e- liquid is one of the original six flavors, called Pink Lips—a combination of passion fruit, strawberry and kiwi. Weddle calls Pink Lips the first home -run hit. As far as the Tasty Tunes line goes, a flavor called Rock, a decadent white chocolate, strawberry and cheesecake flavor, is also very popular. The first Essex flavors had no creams or butters, because Weddle was “afraid” of diacetyl in the beginning, so he avoided those flavors altogether. But, Weddle said that his company “did just fine.” Now, he has flavors that are cheesecakes, custards and creams. Then, the company came up with a single shot of e- liquid.
Essex E-Liquid Founder Talks ‘Premium’ E-Liquid, Being in Business Since 2012 and Upcoming Regulations
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