Juul Says Its Focus Was Smokers, but It Targeted Young Nonsmokers
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Juul’s remarkable rise to resurrect and dominate the e-cigarette business came after it began targeting consumers in their 20s and early 30s, a generation with historically low smoking rates, in a furious effort to reward investors and capture market share before the government tightened regulations on vaping.
As recently as 2017, as evidence grew that high school students were flocking to its sleek devices and flavored nicotine pods, the company refused to sign a pledge not to market to teenagers as part of a lawsuit settlement. It wasn’t until the summer of 2018, when the Food and Drug Administration required it to do so, that the company put a nicotine warning label on its packaging.
Though some former employees recalled Mr. Monsees wearing a T-shirt at the office that used an expletive to refer to Big tobacco, the start-up’s early pitches to potential investors listed selling the business to a big tobacco company as one of the potential ways to cash out. (Last December, the tobacco giant Altria paid $12.8 billion for a 35 percent stake in the company.)....
.... But the company wasn’t abandoning e-cigarettes. On the contrary, it had a breakthrough. It had discovered a way to substantially increase the nicotine levels in a new product, named Juul.
It was this breakthrough that would make the Juul so addictive to teenagers and people who had never smoked.
an interview published by The Verge in April 2015, Ari Atkins, an engineer who had worked on the team developing the Juul, said: “We don’t think a lot about addiction here because we’re not trying to design a cessation product at all.”
He added, according to the article, “Anything about health is not on our mind.” The article noted that his colleagues in the interview winced....
....
Juul’s remarkable rise to resurrect and dominate the e-cigarette business came after it began targeting consumers in their 20s and early 30s, a generation with historically low smoking rates, in a furious effort to reward investors and capture market share before the government tightened regulations on vaping.
As recently as 2017, as evidence grew that high school students were flocking to its sleek devices and flavored nicotine pods, the company refused to sign a pledge not to market to teenagers as part of a lawsuit settlement. It wasn’t until the summer of 2018, when the Food and Drug Administration required it to do so, that the company put a nicotine warning label on its packaging.
Though some former employees recalled Mr. Monsees wearing a T-shirt at the office that used an expletive to refer to Big tobacco, the start-up’s early pitches to potential investors listed selling the business to a big tobacco company as one of the potential ways to cash out. (Last December, the tobacco giant Altria paid $12.8 billion for a 35 percent stake in the company.)....
.... But the company wasn’t abandoning e-cigarettes. On the contrary, it had a breakthrough. It had discovered a way to substantially increase the nicotine levels in a new product, named Juul.
It was this breakthrough that would make the Juul so addictive to teenagers and people who had never smoked.
an interview published by The Verge in April 2015, Ari Atkins, an engineer who had worked on the team developing the Juul, said: “We don’t think a lot about addiction here because we’re not trying to design a cessation product at all.”
He added, according to the article, “Anything about health is not on our mind.” The article noted that his colleagues in the interview winced....
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