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
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