February 2025 marks ten years of Evapo, an achievement we could not have made without the ongoing support of our fantastic customers, and the hard work of all of our Evapo colleagues.
In these ten years we have grown from a single kiosk in Sutton, to over 55 vape shops across the UK with a successful online vape shop and have hit many milestones along the way.
How did Evapo start?
Evapo was first established in Sutton in 2015, with a small vape kiosk made up of mismatched cabinets and a lot of passion.
Our founder, Andrej Kuttruf, saw the potential that vaping poses as a smoking cessation tool and a less harmful alternative to smoking. Although at this time e-cigarettes were a relatively new product on the market, the evidence was already showing that they could be a crucial aid to smokers.
It was around this time that Public Health England first published the finding that vaping is 95% less harmful than smoking, but professional vape retailers were thin on the ground. We saw customers travelling from up to two hours away to purchase vape products that were, at that time, far less easy to find on the high street.
Going from strength to strength
The early days of Evapo certainly were not all plain sailing. With vaping being such a new concept there was a lot of confusion and misunderstanding which made finding premises for our first retail store a challenge. But we were able to open the first official Evapo store in Croydon, and it was shortly followed by our second store in Reading.
From this point we continued to grow quickly, adding nine new retail stores in locations like Southampton and Portsmouth in 2016, making it much easier for vapers to find a location near them to get reliable vaping products. We also started to build our online vape store, offering delivery across the UK and ensuring that customers in areas without easy access to a vape shop could still get the products they needed to help them remain smokefree.
Introducing Ohm Brew
In early 2017 Evapo partnered with a vaping manufacturer in Northern Ireland, to establish WeBottle, our ISO 9001 accredited manufacturing facility in Belfast where we started to create our own vaping products.
From there, the first Ohm Brew e-liquids were launched, a range of high VG short fills that you can still find today in the Badass Blends range. Speaking on launching Ohm Brew, Andrej shared:
“We wanted to produce quality products that meet our high standards, as well as to be able to develop the exact flavours we wanted to launch onto the market and knew our customers would love.”
Not only did the facilities let us expand the e-liquid market, but it also gave us the opportunity to establish our own laboratory, allowing us to ensure all of the products we manufactured could have on-site quality and compliance testing.
The following year Ohm Brew expanded their range to include Ohm Brew 50/50 nic salts, making us the second UK e-liquid brand to offer nic salt e-liquids. The Ohm Brew range has continued to grow and flourish, with a huge variety of different vaping options catering to all different types of vapers.
75% of our customers have successfully quit smoking
As Evapo continued to grow, we knew that we wanted to take every opportunity we could to help smokers make a successful quit attempt. In line with this, in March 2020 our Birmingham Quit Clinic was established, where we collaborated with the local council and a pharmacy partner to offer stop smoking advice and tools.
Little did we know that within weeks of the clinic opening the country would enter the first COVID-19 lockdown, and our ability to offer phone appointments would become crucial to many of our clients. Our Birmingham Quit Clinic quickly became the most successful stop smoking service within the Birmingham area, allowing us to open additional Quit Clinic locations over subsequent years and collaborate with other local authorities and public health service providers.
Helping smokers to quit is in the DNA of Evapo, and turning every smoker into a vaper is an aim we have been working towards since that first store back in 2015. In line with this, to ensure we are offering our customers the most effective advice we started enrolling our colleagues in NCSCT (National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training) stop smoking practitioner training in early 2020. This has now become a part of all new staff training and is a requirement for all of our team members. Today, 100% of our fully-trained colleagues are NCSCT accredited, and 75% of our customers have successfully quit smoking altogether.
Of course, 2020 was not an easy year for anyone, with the COVID-19 pandemic causing multiple UK lockdowns and meaning we had to close our doors temporarily. Fortunately, we were still able to support you thanks to our online retail store and Customer Service team, being able to offer a call and collect service from many of our retail stores. With the amount of uncertainty at this time, we were so glad to be able to continue providing our customers with remote support and home delivery, helping them stay smokefree throughout all the stress.
Using our voice
In the last ten years vaping has gone from strength to strength, and throughout it has been part of our mission to professionalise the industry. We became one of the first members of the UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) in 2017, and in 2023 we also joined the Independent British Vape Trade Association (IBVTA), both of which have helped us work to elevate the standards within the vaping industry and demonstrate corporate responsibility.
We have worked to set an example to others within the industry, through things like our strict age verification procedure which includes the ‘Think 25’ initiative, a comprehensive online age verification process, and regular mystery shoppers in our retail stores.
In the last couple of years, we have been diligently engaging with politicians, members of the House of Lords, and public stakeholders for the health department, to ensure that the interests and needs of current and future vapers are acknowledged by policy makers.
We have used every opportunity available to try and educate decision makers, including contributing to the youth vaping call for evidence, and submitting evidence to the Tobacco & Vapes Bill Committee.
Additionally, we have supported two published clinical trials with our products, helping to further demonstrate the efficacy of vaping as a smoking cessation tool, and regularly engage with the media through print, tv, and radio interviews.
Another area of focus for us is that of sustainable vaping, and we have established a number of initiatives to not only help minimise Evapo’s carbon footprint, but to also help our customers make more informed decisions about the impact of the vaping products they choose.
In 2023 we collaborated with CleanHub to fund the recovery of 12,500 kg of plastic waste before it could reach the ocean. We also work with the charity Eden Reforestation Projects and have committed to planting one tree for every four BrewBox devices sold. We’ve planted 24,000 trees to date.
We encourage our customers, both in store and online, to consider the environmental impact of their vaping choices and opt for reusable vapes over disposable ones. We also offer battery and disposable vape recycling points in all of our retail stores.
Our work with the ‘Swap to Stop’ scheme
When the Government first announced their ‘Swap to Stop’ scheme, which aimed to offer one million smokers a vaping starter kit and support in making a quit attempt, we started working straight away to aid in this initiative.
Evapo underwent a comprehensive compliance assessment and were approved as a supplier for the scheme in November 2023. We are now working with over twenty different public health service providers to supply a wide variety of clients, including unhoused people, pregnant women, and those receiving mental health treatment and support, with starter vape kits.
In line with this, we also undertook an audit of the entire business, including age verification, product compliance, and internal training, to become a Trading Standards approved retailer, as part of their ‘Buy with confidence’ scheme.
Where do we go from here?
Back in 2015 we never could have imagined that Evapo would grow to become what it is today. We now have 55+ specialist vape stores across the UK and employ a team of over 300 amazing employees across the company, many of whom have been with us since the early days and helped us achieve UKVIA employer of the year 2023.
But it is hard to say what the future will hold for us and everyone else in the vaping industry, as it continues to change and grow. With the upcoming disposable vape ban, the Vaping Products Duty, and the proposed Tobacco & Vapes Bill, there is going to be a big shake up for the industry. We see these changes as a good thing overall, as strong and effective regulation is what has help vaping become a recognised and supported stop smoking aid in the UK. Andrej comments:
“We hope that the new regulations will help continue to build the credibility of the vape industry and inspire more trust in the work we are doing. Ultimately, regulations are a good thing, and the UK has long been recognised for the way we have embraced vaping as a smoking cessation tool thanks in big part to successful regulation.”
Proposed changes like the introduction of a vape licensing scheme will help ensure that vaping products are sold only by those businesses who abide strictly to age verification and product compliance. In recent years we have seen an increase in vapes being sold by non-specialist locations like phone shops, market stalls, and even tanning salons, who are not equipped to effectively support and inform customers on vaping and smoking cessation. This illegitimises the industry and the hard work we have done so far. We stand ready to support the Government with these new regulations and embrace the changes that are to come.
We want to take this opportunity to again thank the tens of thousands of customers that we serve every week for their continued support and loyalty, and every one of our colleagues who has helped us to get to celebrate this huge milestone. We are very excited for what the next ten years will bring and look forward to supporting our customers and clients on their health and wellbeing journeys.
