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TOBACCO BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL
MAY/JUNE 2015
“If we don’t innovate,we won’t succeed,”is the mantra of the management
teambehindPAXLabs,amanufacturer of
premiumvaporizers.It’s a fitting
maxim for a company founded by two Stanford University students who
met while pursuing master’s degrees in design.Chatting during a smoking
break at school, James Monsees and Adam Bowen began ruminating on
the many faults of traditional cigarettes and how they might improve that
centuries-old design.
That conversation led to the launch of Ploom, a company dedicated
to finding a better option for smokers. Ploom went through the usual
gyrations plaguing technology startups, including Chinese-made
e-cigarettes beating its first product to market, difficulty raising
funds, and a first product that failed to win consumers over.
However, its founders persevered and, in 2012, unveiled
the Pax. Similar to other personal vaporizing devices in
that users take in nicotine and flavor in the form of vapor,
the Pax allowed smokers to continue using traditional
tobacco by placing it in a stainless steel bowl built into
the loose-leaf vaporizer, which uses heat-not-burn
technology.
“The Pax 1 was a huge success,” says Bowen.
“We’ve sold well over half a million of these
PAX Labs:
Dedicatedto Innovation
By Jennifer Gelfand
How a California company plans
to revolutionize the vaping category.
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