Vapouround magazine ISSUE 11 | Page 209

Alfreton Cotes Park Industrial Estate opportunity in a new trend. Next came a rough start with an e-liquid distributor as Rob explains: “I was setting up a perfume shop in Newcastle with two colleagues who owned five vape shops between them. That evening I met their supplier of e-liquid, and he wanted me to be his distributor. Long story short, Brett and I were mis-sold a distribution. And we ended up with this e-liquid company’s stock which we then sold and opened a couple of e-liquid shops ourselves. The rest is history.” Brett’s experience in perfume packaging design was just what they would need to break strongly into e-liquids. “Shortly after opening the vape shops, Rob said he wanted to make his own liquids. So he got me to design some packaging and then we went to a manufacturer with our ideas and supplied them. It was easy transitioning from perfume to e-liquids. You can’t print a plain box and get sales in the perfume industry, so we had to study the different folds and cuts of cardboard, the means of presentation; the glass, the flavours; how to make everything more marketable, and we applied it to e-liquids.” Looking at the new site, it’s hard to believe such a surging business began so small. When we say the biggest e-liquid facilities in the UK, we’re not saying it in jest: it’s going to happen. We’ve got the building, we’ve got the money. It’s only a matter of time. We don’t waste money: every penny we make goes into growing this business. “We had only three little office-sized rooms,” Brett says. “One room was for boxing bottles, hand-labelling them with a roller all day then making our own boxes up. We were receiving unlabelled bottles. Then we realised that if we bought our own hand-pump we could buy liquid off our manufacturer instead of vice-versa and fill them ourselves. So we built our own clean room. We did all the filling and capping in our clean room, then did labelling and boxing in another, and used a similar sized room for packaging the end product.” Eco Vape proved fruitful, with a prolific output that couldn’t be contained. Expansion was inevitable. bottles, everything. You go into an Eco- Vape Shop you’ll find nothing but Eco- Vape Liquids. We produce that much.” At the moment, Eco Vape are filling between 25,000 and 50,000 bottles a day in the facilities that they already occupy. They want the capability to do half a million a day within the next 18 months, and are on their way to making this a reality. Their expansive ambitions don’t end with e-liquid production, either; Eco Vape has ten shops open with five more on the way. So, watch out. When Vapouround return to Alfreton, we could be standing in the headquarters of an e-liquid empire. “Then we expanded into the warehouse, and built a bigger clean room – 800 square feet, which we outgrew within a month. We couldn’t carry on like that in such a small space. So we built a 1,200 square foot filling room in the warehouse which is what we’re using now. We filled glass, 100ml VAPOUROUND MAGAZINE ISSUE 11 209