With the proliferation of vaping products worldwide, various interesting trends have been emerging. For one, the maximum size of each eliquid, based on new regulations, is now 10ml. From May 2017, all eliquid products that don’t mean that quota aren’t legal to sell.
That means that you’ll no longer be able to buy refill 30ml bottles as you used too. It also means that the size of your tank is going to be set to a maximum of 2ml. So expect ecigarettes with vapour tanks of 5ml to slowly disappear off the shelves, over the coming months.
The Impact of the new Regulations
According to the Jenifer Roberts, the UK category controller at blu, “there will be fewer brands and potentially smaller product ranges,” she cautions. “This will also affect the shape of the retail vaping market, with an estimated 55% of vape shops expected to close by May. This offers a significant opportunity for wholesalers to help their customers grab these consumers and make them regular shoppers.”
Nicotine regulation
Another new regulation is that there’s now a new maximum concentration of 20mg/ml of eliquid. With all things considered, you can expect to find more compact devices and eliquids flavours to be released this year, with older, larger models slowly being phased out.
Pod Mods
With the growing amount of innovation in e-cigarette technology, it’s become less surprising to find new innovative features. Pod mods are the latest gadget in the vaping world, catering to busy vapers who don’t necessarily want to deal with having to refill their eliquid compartment. Similarly to e-cig starter kits, users can replace the pre-filled vape pods with new ones when appropriate.
That effectively makes the job of refilling eliquids far easier. And for new people to the vaping scene, it may become their first go-to option because of the simplicity of use.
What will the future of vaping look like
With the price of vaping related products at an average of £2 per day compared to £5 per day for cigarettes, we expect vaping to grow in popularity even more, over the coming years. With that said, there will be more competition from Big Tobacco. Naturally, independent e-cigarette companies will need to do further work to adjust their strategy. They will need to push their products a little more aggressively to the market, and find ways to prove that their products are very safe to use.
The new regulations are going to be burdensome to small companies, and with the growing amount of people who are against vaping, the industry will face numerous challenges over the coming years. Future threats include blocking advertising of vaping products, distant sales restrictions, and growing tax fees.
With that said, because of the greater amount of research that’s being done, we hopefully expect there to be more acceptance of vaping with the coming results. Naturally, we expect more and more people are going to take up e-cigarettes as a way out of smoking. In light of that, we hope that more health professionals and doctors will come out in favour of vaping products. After all, no single product released in the last century has been able to do as much good for curing people’s cigarette addiction.
Because of that, we’d like to think that it’s going to be harder for regulators to wrap their policies on blocking the vaping market.
Documentaries to watch
For those who are interested in learning more about the vaping industry, we recommend two documentaries for viewing. The first a French production, called Vape Wave, and the latter is a US documentary titled A billion lives – which goes into the dirty tricks of big business to uphold tobacco smoking. Another documentary worth watching is Beyond the Cloud.
At the moment, it’s clear that vaping is experiencing a smear campaign, and we don’t expect that to change anytime soon. There are opposed interests at play here after all, with many US firms and governments benefitting from traditional cigarette sales.