Perhaps it has more to do with a decrease in demand for other products? Anyone who wants a high power temp control mod has more than enough choice. There are plenty of reasonably priced, reasonably reliable mods in that sector. Its pretty much saturated. They have pretty much hit the limit in terms of what is possible and importantly what people are actually using. If you have a 200W box mod but find you are only actually vaping at 100W there is little incentive to buy a new 250W box mod. I suspect that the growth in new users is also slowing. My guess is they are not selling the volume of mods they were 6 or 12 months ago. Manufactures have been forced to explore the niche markets.
Until recently you had to be a pretty committed vaper to get into squonking, they just were not available to buy at your local B&M. Most of the manufactures were low volume and either American or European. The vast majority of sales of squonk mods were via forums, or facebook. In relative terms they were both more awkward and more expensive to buy than more standard gear. I have been squonking for a couple of years, I still visit my local vape store. The owner liked the idea of squonking he could see the advantages in terms of ease of build and use. But he also new he would have a hard time selling them because of the relative cost difference.
Companies like Kanger have some major advantages over companies like REO, they have the economy of scale, and advantages in terms of labour costs and taxation. They can simply produce the mods cheaper in the first place. They also already supply to 1000's of B&M stores and have an established brand name, they sell in high volume so they can afford to take less profit per mod. For consumers this removes the two big barriers to squonking, they are more easily available and cheaper, more in line with other gear that was available.
I think this works out nicely for everyone, more people have access to squonking, at a price they can afford to give it a try. The higher end mod makers will also have a much bigger pool of potential customers, at least some of them will make the leap to a more expensive device.
@muzichead
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@herb
What mod you end up buying is personal preference, it depends on what you feel is important and striking a balance between quality, performance, reliability and price. Slating what somebody else chooses to buy or not is just pointless. We all have different priorities.
