Vape shops have invaded KC. Are they here for good?
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Inside a Northland strip-mall storefront called the Vape Room, wearing a hat that says “Khali Vapors,” Robert Mathis — “Big Rob,” as he is known by some in the local vape community, which, yes, there is such a thing — brings a complex-looking electronic box to his lips, takes a giant pull off its mouthpiece, and expels turbocharged clouds of white, chemical-laden water vapor into the air. He does this every few minutes, blanketing the room with the hazy aroma of blue-raspberry cheesecake.
“I was a 27-year smoker, two packs a day,” Mathis says, sipping from a can of NOS Zero Charged Citrus energy drink. “I can’t tell you how many times I tried to quit. I went to the hospital eight times for pneumonia. Two years ago, I started vaping. Haven’t had so much as a common cold since. No more lung problems. Nothing.”
Now the general manager of the Vape Room, Mathis was originally just a customer, working as a teacher at a local private school. “I’d stop by and start talking to people and think I’d only been here a half-hour. Then I’d check my watch, and three hours had passed,” he says. “It just felt like everything clicked when I was here.” He quickly became a regular, and eventually quit his day job to take over management of the shop.
Mathis now speaks of vaping in near-religious terms. It saved him from the scourge of cigarettes.
“This is not just a shop to us,” Mathis says. “This is a place for people to gather — people who wanted to quit smoking for years but couldn’t do it, and hated themselves for it, and who are now united around vaping. Vaping is how they quit, and it’s nice to be around others who had the same experience. And it becomes a family thing at that point.”
Just a few years ago, e-cigarettes existed in the popular consciousness as little sticks that vaguely resembled real cigarettes and went by brand names like Njoy and Blu. Most were disposable; some could be reloaded with nicotine cartridges. When exhaled, they emitted a modest, odorless cloud of vapor.
Those products — “cigalikes,” they’re sometimes called — still exist. But they don’t have much to do with the vape shops that now dot retail landscapes across Kansas City. In fact, because several cigalike companies are now owned by Big Tobacco companies, most vaping enthusiasts view cigalike companies with derision and suspicion. Vape purists use personal vaporizers, or “open-system” devices. These are the bulky, walkie-talkie-like apparatuses that users such as Mathis fill with various flavors of juices containing various levels of nicotine. They can also be modified to suit one’s vaping preferences — to produce Hiroshima-like clouds of vapor, for example, or to alter the temperature and thereby improve the flavor profile of a certain type of juice.
Bert Brown, a founder of the Fountain City Vapor Club and the point man in Kansas City for BRAVE (Bi-state Regional Advocates for Vaping Education), explains: “A real vape shop, you can walk in and say, ‘I’m a two-pack-a-day Kool smoker,’ and the people working there know what to recommend to satisfy your cravings. They understand the difference between mediocre e-liquid and premium liquid. And they understand the hobbyist side of things — what ratio of PG [propylene glycol] or VG [vegetable glycerin] you’re looking for, do you like a hot vape or a cool vape, etc. And they’ll have a myriad of flavors and nicotine levels and combinations to choose from.” Brown cites the Vape Room, Vapur (on North Oak Trafficway), Cigawatt (in Blue Springs) and Waldo Vapes among the local shops that meet this criteria.
In Overland Park, Kent Hill — a former manager of KC Vapes — is now making a living catering to vape hobbyists, though not through a brick-and-mortar shop. His brand, Twisted Messes, sells RDA (rebuildable dripping atomizer) “builds” — essentially, rejiggering the coils and wires inside vape devices in artistic ways that produce different flavors and maximize the amount of vapor exhaled. About 91,000 people follow Hill’s Instagram account, and another 50,000 subscribe to his YouTube channel, to which he posts instructional videos that show people how to make their own coils. He’s been flown to two e-cigarette conventions this year, and now has his own line of nationally distributed e-cig juice, made by Olathe’s E-Pure Labs, called Twisted Drips.
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“Basically, I used to smoke. Then I came across e-cigs and thought the technology was pretty neat,” Hill says. “I went back and forth between smoking cigarettes and e-cigs, and then, three years ago, quit smoking completely and started vaping. But I wished there was a way to get more vapor out. So I found a rebuildable atomizer and started researching coils.”
“People go crazy about his builds online,” Mathis says. “There’s a whole culture of people nationally, even internationally, who are following his videos and photos. And that interest — from people who are accessing it through YouTube and Vine and other places on the Internet — is helping grow the industry.”
The vaping portion of the e-cigarette industry is growing very quickly. A study this year by Wells Fargo forecast revenues of $3.5 billion for the e-cigarette industry in 2015. And for the first time, open-system vape revenues ($2.5 billion) are expected to surpass cigalike revenues ($1.5 billion). If you were wondering why, for example, two vape shops (Aqueous Vapor and 816 Vapor) opened on 39th Street West within a month of each other (and within a block of each other) this summer, there’s your answer. Vaping is big business. For now.
So far, there are no laws regarding e-cigarettes at the federal level, which has resulted in a pre-0x000Aregulatory bonanza for the industry. Profit margins are high, in part because there’s little in the way of licensing or compliance costs. Anybody with an Internet connection can figure out how to make e-liquid, or “juice.” (The four ingredients: PG, VG, nicotine and food flavoring.) There is no regulatory body ensuring that any e-liquid sold meets any kind of public health standard whatsoever. Though well-regarded local vape shops order e-liquid only from suppliers who say they perform independent studies on their products, several local shops are known to simply mix e-liquid in a back room. A 30ml bottle of juice — about a week’s worth of juice for a regular vaper — can be mixed for less than $2 and sold for $12 to $15.
Long-awaited regulation by the Food and Drug Administration was expected to arrive around April of this year, bringing with it abrupt, industry-wide change. But April came and went, and nothing from the FDA has come down this year.
Michael Felberbaum, media affairs director of the FDA, says the agency is “committed to moving forward expeditiously to finalize the rule.” Of the need for regulation, he adds:
“In 2009, the FDA began detaining shipments of electronic cigarettes asserting that the products appeared to be adulterated, misbranded, or unapproved drug-device combinations under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act).” The FDA also conducted testing, which revealed that some e-cigarette cartridges, Felberbaum says, had “significant variability in nicotine content and the presence of chemical constituents that raised concerns of toxicity.”
E-cigarette manufacturers then challenged in court the FDA’s attempt to regulate their product as a drug. The FDA won. In 2014, the FDA proposed a rule to extend the FDA’s authority to lump e-cigarettes into its definition of “tobacco products” and regulate them the same way that other tobacco products are regulated. It sought input from the general public, which generated 135,000 comments for the agency to consider. The FDA is now reportedly in talks with e-cigarette and e-liquid companies, ostensibly trying to hammer out a way to preserve public health without killing off a rapidly growing industry.
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Though it’s anyone’s guess when the rule will arrive, Felberbaum notes that, consistent with currently regulated tobacco products, under the proposed rule, newly deemed tobacco products would register with the FDA and submit product and ingredient listings, adhere to minimum age and identification restrictions to prevent sales to underage youth, include health warning labels, and market new tobacco products only after FDA review.
Among most vaping advocates, there is consensus that some form of federal regulation is necessary to keep the industry in line. But there’s also widespread concern that the new rules will cripple the business by causing economic barriers to entry so prohibitive that only deep-pocketed corporations (and Big Tobacco) would be represented in the marketplace. Most of that concern relates to the part about FDA review.
“What will knock out every small and medium-sized business in this industry is if the FDA requires retroactive pre-market review for every e-cigarette product sold,” says Gregory Conley of the American Vaping Association, an advocacy group. “That’s a cost of $8 million to $10 million for each product — to go through toxicology tests, physiology tests, child psychology tests, adult psychology tests, literature reviews. Only the tobacco companies can afford that.”
The e-cig industry party line is that e-cigs are not a gateway to smoking, as its detractors suggest, but a smoking-cessation tool. Conley and other pro-vapers point to a recent e-cigarette study by Public Health England, an executive agency of the UK’s Department of Health (comparable to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States), which found that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful than traditional cigarettes and should be recommended to people who are trying to quit smoking. Domestically, though, no such study exists. And entrenched anti-smoking groups do not view e-cigarettes through the same rose-colored glasses as the vape community.
The American Cancer Society does not recommend e-cigarettes to help people quit smoking, and endorses only various nicotine sprays, gums and patches for smoking cessation.
“The makers of e-cigarettes say that the ingredients are ‘safe,’ but this only means the ingredients have been found to be safe to eat,” the ACS notes on it website. “Inhaling a substance is not the same as swallowing it. There are questions about how safe it is to inhale some substances in the e-cigarette vapor into the lungs. And e-cigarettes are not labeled with their ingredients, so the user doesn’t know what’s in them. The amounts of nicotine and other substances a person gets from each cartridge are also unclear.”
Erika Sward, vice president of advocacy for the American Lung Association, says, “We’re greatly troubled by what’s going on throughout the entire e-cigarette industry. Anytime in the last seven years, any e-cig company has been free to submit to the FDA a product that is a safe and effective way to help smokers quit. To our knowledge nobody has. What they’re looking for is a sweetheart deal, a continuation of the Wild West that exists now where makers of e-cigarettes are not accountable to anyone. And that’s unacceptable.”
With no action from the feds, a growing patchwork of laws and ordinances is being pushed through at the state and municipal levels. Some are hospitable to the industry; others, not so much.
As a state, Missouri is pretty friendly to the vape crowd. You must be over 18 years old to buy e-cigarette products in the Show-Me State, and bottles of e-liquid are required to have childproof caps. In 2014, Missouri legislators proposed — and overrode Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of — a bill that would prevent e-cigarettes from being defined as “tobacco products.” This distinction is key, because it exempts e-cigarettes from being taxed as tobacco products in Missouri.
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Kansas, on the other hand, recently became the third state in the country to pass an e-cigarette tax. The tax was inserted into a budget bill — without a hearing, without passing either chamber, without any real discussion — on the 18th day of overtime in last spring’s turbulent session. As of July 2016, every milliliter of e-liquid sold in Kansas will be taxed 20 cents. For regular vapers who buy a 30ml bottle of juice every five to seven days, that’s a $6 increase per week.
“[Kansas state Sen.] Les Donovan carried the water for the tobacco companies for it,” says Spencer Duncan, a lobbyist for the Kansas Vape Association. “Legislators were facing a state shutdown — they were three weeks into overtime. Nobody really understood the e-cig tax, but nobody was going to fall on their sword at that point for a couple-million-dollar tax proposal that sounded OK on its face.”
Duncan continues: “It tells you something that R.J. Reynolds was the one pushing for this tax on e-cigarettes. They sell an e-cigarette product [VUSE], so why are they asking the Legislature to tax their product? Obviously they have an ulterior motive. And that’s that they’re losing money because they’re losing traditional smokers to vaping. Sure, they make a little money off their e-cig. But not nearly as much as they’re making selling cartons of traditional cigarettes. They’re trying to make vaping more expensive, so it’s not cheaper to switch to vaping — so that people will just stick with traditional cigarettes.”
Duncan says he’s spoken with several legislators he believes will work in the 2016 session to modify the law before it takes effect next year. He also notes that the Kansas Department of Revenue has a long way to go before it can effectively enforce this tax.
“I can open a vape shop today in Kansas, and I’m not required to get a license, I’m not yet required to pay any special taxes, I’m not required to report any specific sales,” he says. “How is the Department of Revenue going to make sure I’m paying them 20 cents per milliliter on juice sales if they don’t even know where the product is, where the store is? And as of today, they have no answers for any of this. They passed this thing in the middle of a budget crisis, with no direction for the people who are supposed to enforce it or the people who are supposed to abide by it.”
Further restrictions depend on where you are in the metro. The Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas, changed the definition of smoking to include e-cigarettes, effectively banning their use in public indoor places. Olathe did the same thing, but allowed e-cig use in vape stores. Sampling is allowed in Overland Park vape stores, but unless you’re one of the three vape stores grandfathered in when the ordinance was passed, you have to be operating in a stand-alone building — no vape shops in strip malls there. Brown says that last restriction has stifled vaping in OP almost as much as an outright sales ban.
“The cost of renting a standalone building for retail is three times the cost of a spot in a strip mall,” he says. “These are small, mom-and-pop shops with one or two employees per shop. They can’t afford that extra cost.”
The Lee’s Summit City Council, on the other hand, recently voted not to consider a recommendation from the city’s health advisory board to ban e-cigs in bars, restaurants and public places. And Kansas City, Missouri, hasn’t made any real moves, either — hence the explosion of shops around midtown. As this story was going to press, we noticed another one setting up — a second outpost of 816 Vapor, this one at the Uptown Shoppes, on Broadway north of 39th Street.
Though the FDA will probably shut off the lights at backroom-batch vape shops, some will survive. Those that do are likely to be either larger, multilocation operations or boutiquelike shops with dedicated customer bases willing to pay higher prices for better products and smart service.
Aqueous Vapors falls in the former camp. Founded in Columbia, Missouri, two years ago, it now boasts 17 stores and counting. Kevin Osterberger, the chief operating officer of the company, tells The Pitch that 14 of those shops are owned by the company, and three by franchisees.
“There’s been much more interest in that [franchising] lately,” Osterberger says. “It’s a great way to financial independence for a store owner.”
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He says Aqueous has never made juice in-house. “That’s never been a model we wanted to incorporate,” he says. “Our shops carry 20 premium juices made by U.S. manufacturers in U.S. ISO 7 clean-room labs that we have toured ourselves.”
Though there’s no way to know exactly how hard the FDA’s hammer will come down on the industry, Osterberger says Aqueous has positioned itself to be ready for what he calls “sensible regulation.”
“Childproof caps, no sales to minors, manufacturers producing juice in a lab environment — those are all things we’re in favor of and already complying with,” he says. “That said, I think it’s a bad idea for the government to start targeting e-liquids as a source of tax revenue.”
One might view Waldo Vapes, at 7234 Wornall, as the Fervere to Aqueous’ Hostess Bakery. Its owner, Jon Brower, actually used to work at Fervere — the West Side artisanal bakery that draws young urban professionals and assorted bread heads willing to stand in line for a great loaf.
Brower brings a bit of that sensibility to his shop, which he opened in June 2014. At Waldo Vapes, there are bar stools in front of the counter and a couch to one side, giving the place a loungelike vibe. Wooden mods that come with a lifetime warranty are available for $150 or more. Brower orders from premium suppliers who, as he puts it, “are basically the ones having conversations with the FDA about how the regulation will go.” He adds, “We want forward-looking suppliers manufacturing in the cleanest possible conditions, with lot numbers on bottles to track batches, lab tests, full transparency.”
A barrel mounted on the wall features a design with fonts you might recognize from a craft-cocktail menu. “That’s Five Pawns,” Brower says, motioning toward the barrel. “They do a special-edition flavor that comes out once a year. Toasted almond, roasted coconut, Kentucky bourbon, finished in an oak cask for four weeks, then filtered and sent to the lab. It’s amazing. People try it and they’re like, ‘I never thought I’d taste all these things together.’ It’s not, you know, like what maybe some people think of when they think of vaping — like a tobacco taste with a bunch of peach flavoring mixed in. That’s not really what we’re about here.”
Though Waldo Vapes sells basic starter pens (EVODs, about $40 with a bottle of juice), much of its clientele is made up of hobbyists and enthusiasts. As a result, Brower says, labor is a bigger expense. “Knowledgeable employees cost more,” he says. “But the people who appreciate what we do really appreciate what we do.”
He also notes that nearly every flavor of juice Waldo Vapes carries comes with an option of zero nicotine. (Nicotine strength in juices varies — the low end is 3 mg per ml, and the high about 18 mg per ml.)
“Our first eight months in business, we sold zero bottles of no-nicotine juice,” Brower says. “Now I’d say about 5 percent of the customers who come through are looking for it. People wean themselves down from high levels of nicotine to lower, and sometimes to none. Which I think tells you that vaping really does work for quitting smoking.”
Brower says Waldo Vapes should be fine as long as the FDA doesn’t come in and “ban everything.” There’s concern the FDA will take away sweets flavors, arguing that their design targets children. “That would be bad for us,” he says.
“I mean, I get that not everybody wants to see and smell it [vaping]. I’m all for a ban in public places. There’s no need to blow it in people’s faces. I always tell people, ‘Don’t vape at a restaurant. Just step outside, man.’ ”
