The pods were a problem.
We did not have a 100% yield, anywhere near that.
You set out to make a hundred…
…maybe ended up with eight good.
To get a battery in there, to get the tubes in there,
to get the pods small enough to work, was a technical challenge.
People would say, "We need a bigger unit." James refused to budge on the unit size.
He really liked the way that unit looked.
I never saw a single proposal by Marketing ever be pushed back on.
There was never any, "No, let's not do this."
We all knew from day one, children smoking JUULs was a disaster.
There was no doubt about that.
James actually came out of his office one day and said,
"Guys, this is a smoking product. We gotta start thinking that way."
And I remember that was quite a shift for him,
because there was always this Silicon Valley mentality of,
"Get as big as you can as fast as you can."
"Figure out the rest later."
I think the expectations on how successful JUUL was gonna be
were rapidly shrinking.
In fact, at one point, we stopped production for two weeks
because we had ordered too much.
They expected JUUL to be big,
but then when the JUUL came out,
James was in a panic because he thought the product was going to fail terribly.
We were doing things manually,
and they were extremely expensive to hand-assemble and hand-fill.
We were selling potentially at a loss.
I was trying to get some automated equipment,
and me and James got into an argument that spilled into the parking lot
over $500.
It was right in the middle of the morning.
There was tension in the air
because we knew that there had been some rumblings
about some of the numbers were really bad in terms of JUUL.
Anyway, we're hanging around,
but, normally, the board was insulated from the company.
This is the first time this guy Pritzker had ever spoken directly.
Says, "We're having an immediate all-hands meeting."
He was very blunt, not happy at all with the way things were going.
"I see a lot of stupid decisions being made."
And he marched James up to the front, the guy from the board got up there says,
"Effective immediately, James is out."
Right like that, in front of the whole company.
He was sitting on a table.
He was looking down. He wasn't looking up.
His feet were swinging in the air.
And… bam.
I was so angry at that board because he had built that company.
He didn't deserve to be treated like that.
And all of a sudden, the board stepped in and took a very active role.