[cerebral music playing]
[anonymous JUUL engineer] The buzz was fantastic. Flavor was cool.
[Eschenbach] I was literally floored.
And it kind of made me feel like a virgin.
[flick]
My immediate reaction was really like, "This feels exactly like a cigarette."
[man exhaling]
But I quickly realized, "This isn't the same. This is better."
[Casselman] I remember trying it for a couple of days,
and I realized that I had just… quit smoking.
It was this huge moment for me.
[Gladstone] Ever since one puff,
and never again smoked another cigarette my entire life.
Never again.
[Pierce] With the JUUL, they had made something remarkable.
Their one job now is to get it everywhere.
This is a bold product to put out
up against these companies that have existed since forever.
[Lorenz] If you know you have a product that is going to change an industry,
that's exciting.
[Pierce] The JUUL came onto my radar in about 2015.
People had been hearing about what this new JUUL thing might be,
and it started to percolate into my brain
that there's something bigger and interesting happening here.
The reason I was interested in them is because
there was this big question going on at the time:
How do we use technology to improve every piece of everybody's lives?
You have people like the Uber founders, who say,
"I was just trying to get around, and getting a cab was annoying."
Or people didn't know where their friends were, so they invented Twitter.
JUUL felt like a particularly high-stakes version of that.
The idea that we can use technology
to improve the lives of a billion people was really appealing.
The first thing you would notice walking into their offices
was that everybody was vaping.
Everybody.
[indistinct chatter]
[Pierce] James was a total tech guy. I mostly mean that in a good way.
He was super confident, super smart,
thoughtful about the kind of thing they were trying to do.
He wanted something that felt cool and discreet
and wasn't trying to build a better cigarette.
He wanted to actually change the experience of smoking.
And the clear sense they had was,
"We have reinvented smoking."
The headline of my article was,
"This Might Just Be the First Great E-Cig."
If you take this thing people enjoy the experience of
but don't want to die from,
and replicate the experience without the bad parts,
that tracked as the right way to think about this.
They had made something remarkable.
Appearing in a publication like Wired was huge for them
because it lent the company legitimacy as it launched JUUL.
[anonymous engineer] The mission was, make something that had enough nicotine.
you wouldn't feel a need to go back to your combustion cigarette.
We were trying to get smokers away from smoking with various options.
So JUUL offered flavors
for the same reason Tesla offers multiple colors.
Not everyone's going to like the same.
[Casselman] When we started, we had four flavors.
[Rougeau] You cover all bases with fruit, brûlée, mint,
and then tobacco for all your Marlboro Red smokers.
Their flavors had incredibly stupid names.
Like "fruit" was spelled F-R-U-U-T.
And "crème brûlée" was B-R-U-U-L-E.
[chuckling] And "mint" was spelled M-I-I-N-T.
They were just trying so hard that it felt dumb, honestly.
But flavors were a key part of the whole thing.
They wanted to make this not only satiating from a nicotine perspective,
but also enjoyable and pleasant to smoke,
and smells better than your average cigarette.
[Casselman] Your typical vaper doesn't want to smell like a cigarette,
doesn't want to inhale the carcinogens from a cigarette,
or just wants some different flavors.
I thought the names were stupid, but the idea was pretty smart.
James and Adam created a product that seemed like it would work well
and be attractive to users.
But there were still issues.
[supply chain engineer] Pods were a problem.
We did not have a 100% yield, anywhere near that.
You set out to make a hundred,
we maybe ended up with eight that were good.
[cerebral music playing]
[Pierce] A lot of people got a squirt of nicotine into their mouth
when they would inhale.
[Ducharme] One employee said he got crème brûlée liquid in his mouth so often
that he now can't eat crème brûlée because it was so disgusting.
[supply chain engineer] To get a battery in there, 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.
[anonymous engineer] That's what a visionary does. He's an artist.
But, you know, we were rushed.
About a month before the original launch date,
we didn't have a way to fill pods yet.
[Ducharme] James told them, "You have to figure the problems out."
"You have no other choice."
Ever heard the adage, "When in doubt, ship it"?
[man laughing]
There was pressure to get this product out there.
PAX, a loose-leaf tobacco and cannabis vaporizer,
was the engine from a financial perspective.
But we started to see some PAX revenue wane.
[Ducharme] At the same time, Japan Tobacco International,
who was a major investor,
was growing uncomfortable with how much the PAX devices
were becoming associated with marijuana.
[Eschenbach] JTI said, "We can't be part of a company involved with cannabis,
so we're going to part ways."
So in the end, we paid them the $10 million back.
In some ways, splitting with JTI was actually a good thing.
Many employees felt uncomfortable
that a tobacco company was a major investor.
JUUL wanted to be a tech company
and didn't want to be dragged down by the stink, so to speak,
of the tobacco industry.
At that point in time, getting a reliable, solid product
that we could start ramping manufacturing on was the biggest focus.
[Ducharme] Investors had been pouring money into the company for years,
and they were antsy for some of that money back.
So James and Adam knew that they needed JUUL to sell, and to sell really well.
It's hard for a company to have a mission it believes in and cares deeply about
and a board who wants tons of growth.
"I gave you millions of dollars, and you owe me billions of dollars."
"If we make the world a better place in the meantime, fantastic."
[Eschenbach] If a company doesn't make profit, it's not gonna last long.
Public health first,
but you can't have public health if nobody buys the product.
[Jonathan Mildenhall] Silicon Valley is known for these big, iconic companies,
but what we don't remember
is the graveyard of start-ups that is also Silicon Valley.
And so when a company is going to market for the first time,
it's really important to get it right.
You only have one chance to make a first impression.
So I, uh… I love smoking.
And uh, I know I'm not alone in this. It's been…
[Ducharme] James is extremely confident and believed in himself very deeply,
but it started to become apparent that he was not the kind of founder
who could become his own brand and sell the company to the world.
We're not an activist company. We're not prescriptive in our products.
If you don't like what we're making better than cigarettes,
then have a cigarette.
That's fine. We're not against that…
[Ducharme] It was incredibly jarring to hear somebody say something like,
"If you don't like our product, go smoke a cigarette,"
because the whole idea of the company
had been built on the fact that cigarettes are bad for you.
[Casselman] He might say, in like, the context of talking to a journalist,
exactly what he believes,
as opposed to whatever is the most beneficial thing to say for the company.
[JUUL employee] I don't think that he had a very good handle
on what it was that we were going to do by way of marketing.
It's really important that you get the strategy and the execution right.
The stakes are incredibly high.
[Ducharme] As JUUL's launch date got closer,
James needed someone he could rely on to sell it.
He had someone at the company who'd already proven himself
to be a talented marketer.
Richard Mumby first joined the company as a marketing consultant,
and he was the polar opposite of your typical Silicon Valley bro.
He had a degree from Dartmouth,
he'd worked at fashion start-ups in New York City,
and he was basically a social media influencer.
Every time I met Richard Mumby, it felt like he knew exactly what he was doing.
Like he was prepared for every interaction that he had during the day.
He kind of exudes confidence, and it's intoxicating.
[Ducharme] James entirely trusted him to run everything to do with marketing,
so that's what Mumby did.
Richard Mumby is a dumbass fuck who I never want to meet again,
and I believe he had a big hand in ruining JUUL.
[Steven Baillie] I had worked with Richard on different marketing initiatives,
so he reached out and told me about an exciting opportunity he had
in San Francisco, and asked me if it'd be something I'd be interested in.
I have a career specializing in luxury advertising, lifestyle advertising.
["Them Changes" by Thundercat playing]
I'm not trying to flex, this is not about my vanity,
but if you're a start-up and you want to be relevant,
you need a douse of sexy, I'd be the guy they would call.
♪ When I'm sitting here Knowing this ain't real ♪
[Ducharme] Baillie had a colorful reputation in the fashion world.
He was sort of seen as a party boy,
always surrounded with models and DJs and influencers.
But he was definitely seen as somebody
who could make a product look cool and sell it.
When you look under the hood of advertising, what is it really about?
Desirability is imperative if you're launching something, right?
[music fades]
[inhales]
And the whole vaping thing was really goofy.
[slurping]
Gnarly fucking plumes.
[laughs]
[Lorenz] If you told somebody about e-cigarettes in the first half of 2010s,
they wouldn't have any idea of what you were talking about
or would think that sounds lame and nerdy.
[Pierce] Everybody had either these things that looked like cigarettes
but were worse, like a fake cigarette,
or these huge monster rigs
that would make these crazy, giant clouds of smoke.
[Ducharme] James and Adam wanted JUUL to be seen
as a luxurious, sophisticated product that people would not be embarrassed to use,
unlike some vaping products that had been seen as dorky and uncool.
I mean, there's a barren wasteland of awful, tacky stuff.
Even the mainstream brands that were putting out devices
were so corny. It was just, like, "Wow."
It felt as though we were playing in amateur leagues.
It really struck me that the devices looked like Stanley Kubrick's monolith
in Space Odyssey, 2001.
The godlike presence of that device in those films,
and the mystery behind it, was a huge inspiration for me.
I also had Apple on the mind,
the way that Apple markets their products.
They're beautiful, sumptuous objects to be worshiped.
But how do you dial up that appeal? What does that look like?
And it comes from a lot of strategy, some research, and some instincts.
It's like, how do you get it on people's radar?
Launch campaigns are arguably the most critical factor
in an early-stage start-up's existence.
It's through that launch campaign
that you're actually accelerating, or otherwise,
the potential growth of the company.
And if you get a launch campaign wrong,
then you don't really get a second chance.
[Baillie] San Fran was this e-comm start-up hub.
Everyone was setting up camp, but from a style perspective…
I don't know if I should say this, but…
We've got a bunch of Zuckerberg-type dudes coming from Stanford,
and they were out of touch with being relevant and cool.
And so if we're using people in these ads,
what do they look like? Who are they? Where are they?
[hip-hop music playing]
[Baillie] When I started working with Richard, I said,
"Look, Vice Magazine, Williamsburg,
this is where it's all going down."
He immediately agreed.
[indistinct shouting]
During this period, a huge inspiration to me was Terry Richardson.
He had his finger on the pulse of what was happening culturally.
It's the President, the next day it's Beyoncé, and then it's Rihanna.
Richard gravitated to that approach.
The overarching theme that we developed was "Come As You Are,"
the Nirvana song, right?
The idea is come as you are. You're not gonna be styled,
you don't need to do your hair and makeup. Like, be yourself.
We had a bunch of this stuff where the JUUL was worked into
what you would call a lifestyle scenario.
A lot of folks in advertising think lifestyle is a cheap trick.
Get someone who's good-looking, handsome, give him anything, it's gonna work.
But I think it definitely works.
[indistinct chatter]
Richard presented the work to the founders,
and I don't recall specific feedback.
There were just certain devices that they gravitated towards.
They liked the color.
They liked that that design motif came back to the device.
Everybody signed off on the creative,
and we were ready to start into production on these shoots.
[Mildenhall] You've got Adam and James, who had this problem,
they had this technology, they were going to solve the problem.
But then in walks Richard,
and Richard clearly not interested in the mission,
but sees a massive opportunity to drive growth.
[inhales, exhales deeply]
I think everyone was mindful of that mission statement.
I think once we went down the approved path,
it just became something completely different.
[shutter clicking]
[Baillie] There was no talk of mission statements on the photo shoot.
And sometimes when you're bringing a brand's mission statements to life,
it doesn't work consumer-facing.
So the direction we decided to take was more focused on the cool factor, right?
[Mildenhall] Their initial idea was conceived with a particular use-case,
somebody who's already smoking,
and Richard took it into a completely different demographic
based on a lifestyle proposition of urban cool.
[Mimi Sweeney] I was 17 at the time,
when my friend messaged me about just a random party.
So… let me hit this real quick.
Mmm.
Also, anything I say about fake IDs is like, not an issue, right?
-[woman] No. -Okay, just want to make sure.
It's an open bar. Who doesn't love free alcohol? Obviously.
So we were like, "Let's just go check it out."
But we had no idea what we were walking into.
You were greeted by someone with a Polaroid camera.
The pink and the blue really set the vibe.
They definitely had the right ambiance.
["Mouthful of Diamonds" by Phantogram playing]
♪ You're getting high on your own supply ♪
[Sweeney] They had great DJs playing,
and on all the projections, they had "JUUL" on the walls.
And they all had hashtags on them,
which gave us the cues for what to put into our posts.
So I remember I used the #JUUL, #VAPORIZED, #JUULvapor.
We were told to post it anywhere we wanted.
So, Twitter, Instagram.
You know, we were dancing, having fun.
There was a lot of coughing going around the room that night.
[shutter clicks]
[Sweeney] My first hit of the JUUL…
[bubbling]
[exhaling]
…was different from others because I didn't cough the first time.
So that's what kind of turned me on to it.
Me and my best friend used to smoke Newports.
I realized it was stronger. It had a different effect.
And I do remember thinking, like, "Oh."
"Is this what a cigarette is supposed to be like?"
Or if maybe I'd been smoking cigarettes wrong or something.
One thing I liked about it was the sleekness
did remind me of the sleekness of an iPhone.
The first flavor I tried was the fruit flavor,
but flavor of choice was mint.
I remember a lot of my friends saying that they didn't like it,
but I took two devices home.
[Baillie] They wanted a small takeover at Times Square.
I walked down there with a couple cameras.
I was just like, "Wow."
[introspective music playing]
The way the whole thing was orchestrated,
the way the animation sequences went around the corner, was incredible.
What a platform to see your work displayed in.
It was really exciting.
After the launch party, the strategy was to get JUUL
in front of as many people as possible.
JUUL needed to be successful
to satisfy the board and investors and people at the company.
But the challenge was that they didn't yet have the budget
to put together a huge, elaborate launch campaign.
[Baillie] Part of their strategy was to get boots on the ground
and have pop-ups in key cities to get the device out there in the world.
[JUUL employee] Our mind state was getting them in places
where we knew people of influence were around or were going to.
We had little sampling tips,
and we would treat it like a hookah lounge.
[Halverson] Sampling became a very intrical part
of all the campaigns that we did.
And I'd see these big, burly guys doubling over.
[making coughing sounds]
Wiping the tears.
"Wow. Can I have another?"
[Mildenhall] The Vaporized campaign was exquisite
at getting the coolest kids to promote the JUUL product
on their own social media.
[Lorenz] You started to see booths pop up at parties
where you'd take a moment away, hop into the booth,
create content to share on social media.
JUUL was trying to associate itself with young, internet-savvy, cool kids
to ride that boom in influencer marketing.
JUUL did a good job of tapping into people known as "It girls" and "It boys."
People like Lucas Abbat and Tavi Gevinson.
They were associating themselves with tastemakers.
But at the same time, people at JUUL were sending out free products
to a long list of influencers and celebrities
like Leonardo DiCaprio and Bella Hadid.
Every start-up was using this tactic.
Selling a way of life is the most effective way of selling a product.
If you run a company and want it to grow, that was the way to grow it.
[Pierce] JUUL throws a party,
invites people with a lot of followers on Instagram,
gives them JUULs, and gives them cool things to take pictures in front of.
It just looks like all the cool people you know are JUULing.
[Ducharme] The launch campaign was targeted towards millennials,
which struck some people as a strange decision
because smoking wasn't terribly popular with millennials.
I never saw a single proposal by Marketing ever be pushed back on.
[mouse click]
There was never any, "No, let's not do this."
I'm not a born marketer either.
So if they said, "This is what's necessary to get this going,
and here's what we'll promise in terms of results,"
um, the board went with it.
The investors are investing in the launch campaign,
and they're expecting to see signals
that this business has huge potential growth ahead of it.
[Ducharme] Among the board, one person in particular was concerned,
an investor named Alexander Asseily.
[Mildenhall] Alex Asseily was the only voice of dissent
as the campaign went to market.
He felt that it was way off strategy,
and he understood that, if this strategy was to succeed,
the organization might never be able to walk back from it.
[JUUL supply chain engineer] We did the Vaporized campaign.
You know, models dancing,
holding a JUUL in their hand.
It seemed like this was going to be the coolest thing in the world.
Probably a bad idea.
I feel it was effective in terms of what we were trying to achieve.
But the initial response to the campaign… we immediately got negative feedback.
E-cigarette makers are allowed to advertise to anyone on TV,
which has led to ads like this one for JUUL Vapor.
[dance music playing]
[audience cheering]
Mm-mm.
Yeah! Something about inhaling poison steam makes me want to dance
in a way that doesn't require much lung strength.
[audience laughing]
[Conley] Ultimately, the problem with JUUL's early marketing
was that while they had sat down and read thousands of pages
of tobacco industry documents about nicotine salts,
they apparently hadn't read the thousands of pages about tobacco industry marketing.
If you were starting a start-up putting out a nicotine product,
why reinvent the wheel?
JUUL, in its advertising,
faithfully followed the playbook of Big Tobacco companies
and their cigarette brands.
The Vaporized campaign.
It has direct roots
from the way the tobacco industry marketed to youth.
Take a bunch of 20-somethings, and you have them dance around.
Many of the thematics look like Newport ads.
Social groups of teenagers, ones and twos, doing fun things,
playing, dancing around.
[Dr. Proctor] The themes that are put forward with Vaporized,
of individuality, adventure, and glamour,
those were older themes that had been developed by Big Tobacco.
Look at the hair.
Look at the faces.
Look at the poses.
Employing glamour,
sophistication and youth,
and cool.
[Dr. Jackler] They gave away tens and tens of thousands of free JUULs.
That's an old trick of drug dealers everywhere, right?
The first one is always free.
[Dr. Jackler] They took the very worst elements of tobacco marketing.
Cigarette makers could no longer advertise on television. JUUL could.
Cigarette makers could no longer have a billboard on Times Square.
JUUL could.
[mouse click]
[Ducharme] Shortly after the Vaporized campaign came out,
AdAge ran a story about the campaign.
Within that article, somebody was quoted as saying
that the advertisements looked very similar to old Big Tobacco ads.
This was a bombshell within the company.
Mumby's team leapt into hyperdrive
and started redoing aspects of the Vaporized campaign,
even though it had just come out.
[suspenseful music playing]
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."
They got caught, in a sense, and you end up with an apology tour,
or a retreat.
When we launched JUUL,
we had a campaign that was uh,
arguably too kind of lifestyle-oriented, too flashy.
It lasted less than six months.
Adam Bowen said, "It was too lifestyle-oriented."
That's a "tepid" way of saying it was, in fact, very youth-oriented.
[Mildenhall] There's a saying in Silicon Valley,
"Move fast and break things."
This Vaporized campaign
was conceived, pre-produced, and executed in less than a month.
That's really, really quick.
[Dr. Jackler] It was wildly irresponsible for the creative leadership
to have no knowledge of what was responsible marketing
of a tobacco product.
I want to be clear, Steven Baillie was hired help
to execute a playbook that he was known for.
Young, smiley, happy, sexually provocative people
having a great time.
It's really not Steven's responsibility
to set the strategic direction for the brand.
Baillie and Mumby took the marching orders from the senior leadership of JUUL,
and they created the goal of getting the cool kids.
[clearing throat]
So, uh, one of the things I wanted to talk about
was that Stackler professor from Stanford.
-[woman] It's Jackler. -Jackler, Stackler.
It was kind of shocking that he was a professor.
I'm not here to take shots at him,
but this idea that we went through the hallowed hall
of bad tobacco advertising,
and extracted elements,
as if we even had the time for that, you know, it was comical in a sense,
because of the time it actually took to do this whole thing.
It wouldn't have been physically possible to do what he was suggesting.
If I could take credit for creating this thing that was a cultural phenomenon,
maybe, I mean…
I'd be the most wanted creative professional on the planet,
but it didn't work out like that. It was, you know--
My name was getting thrown around the press,
and uh, it got really scary, you know?
I'm coming out of it. I just feel weird being like, "Wah, wah, wah."
I'm a grown man. If I have to drive Uber, fuck it.
What am I going to do?
[Rougeau] I remember what the first day was like.
They had just sent the samples to my house. I was super excited.
I had a list of stores I was going to visit.
I was like, "I'm going to hit the ground running. It'll be awesome."
I get to the first vape shop. They're like, "We don't want it."
I'm like, "Let me see if I can change it up and go to a smoke shop."
"No, we don't want it."
And it was like that.
No one wanted it. [chuckles] No one wanted it at all.
[Ducharme] JUUL was starting to spread on social media.
People were posting about it after the sampling tour,
but in real life, things were not looking as good.
Salespeople were struggling to convince retailers to stock JUUL products.
[Rougeau] I don't think they got what we were selling.
They just saw pretty people holding what looked like a USB stick.
Are we selling the models, or are we selling the JUUL?
This guy, he calls us and he's like, "Hey, is this uh, JUUL?" I'm like, "Yeah."
He's like, "Are you the person who sent me those JUUL pods?"
"Yep, what'd you think?"
"First off, I got a bunch of juice in my mouth."
"I'm not thrilled about that."
[Ducharme] Even after JUUL launched,
people were still reporting this juice-in-mouth problem.
One employee tested this huge batch of JUUL pods,
and almost one in five leaked.
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.
[indistinct conversation]
[Ducharme] To get the JUUL device to a point where it could be sold widely
was a huge undertaking.
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.
[tense music playing]
[Ducharme] James wanted to call the shots, even if it wasn't his area of expertise.
He wanted to be the one in charge.
[reporter talking indistinctly]
Big changes are coming to the e-cigarette market.
The FDA released new rules today. The agency…
[Ducharme] On top of all of these problems,
the FDA was finalizing its rules for regulating e-cigarettes.
[Mitch Zeller] The Food and Drug Administration regulates
most of the foods, all the drugs, and, since 2009, tobacco products.
When I became center director,
e-cigarettes were not under FDA regulation.
It took the better part of seven years to finally begin to regulate e-cigarettes.
[reporter] The industry has never been regulated
or taxed by the federal government,
but today, a new set of rules came out.
That includes banning sales to anyone under 18,
requiring package warning labels,
and making all products subject to government approval.
[Zeller] Instead of it being the Wild West
and the companies being able to do anything that they wanted,
if they wanted to bring a new product to market,
if they wanted to make a claim for their products,
they had to come to FDA first.
[Ducharme] E-cigarette makers could keep selling any vaping product
already on the market,
but they couldn't introduce new ones.
So for JUUL to be told basically to freeze in place
and say, "We'll grandfather in this thing,
because you did it before we were paying attention,
but now we're paying attention, and if you try to do anything else,
you're going to get the full scrutiny and wrath of the FDA,"
I think it just left them feeling sort of static.
[supply chain engineer] 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, uh…
His feet were swinging in the air.
And, uh, 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.
[Pierce] James being demoted didn't really surprise me,
but it did surprise me that the board would come in and say,
"We don't have a CEO."
"We're just going to run this company for the foreseeable future."
Board members suddenly de facto running the company
is basically unheard of.
James and Adam had lost control of their company by then,
because they gave away too much of it.
[Ducharme] That's when JUUL started to become a company driven by profit
and this desire to become a corporation rather than a scrappy little start-up.
[anonymous JUUL engineer] Because of the waning revenue
and the lack of performance from JUUL,
there was discussion about killing JUUL altogether.
It was a lot of fear that, "What have we done?"
"Have we just wasted all this energy and time and resources in creating this?"
But sometimes you get a lucky hit.
So…
after the party,
I think that my relationship with cigarettes changed.
I carried the JUUL with me more often.
When my friends saw me vaping that summer, they were like, "What is that?"
[camera shutter clicking]
[chiming]
[man] Mimi, go!
[Sweeney] I started college in August 2016.
Because I carried it around with me so often,
I did have a big influence on JUUL in our college campus.
I remember my roommates would make fun of me for it,
but they eventually got one.
You felt like you were almost a part of a secret club
that no one knew about yet.
But I'd say around my sophomore year of college, everyone had one,
or at least everyone knew about it, and they'd be like, "Can I hit your JUUL?"
[Rougeau] June or July 2016, we just blew up.
[supply chain engineer] JUUL orders just took off out of nowhere.
We are just flying through product.
When sales started rolling in, all of a sudden I'm realizing,
"Wait a minute, this is really going somewhere."
[Rougeau] The only thing I can guess is, somewhere in New York,
somebody asked the question, "What is that?"
And then we just got hot.
[upbeat music playing]
I think it was word of mouth.
[Casselman] I ended up telling a lot of my friends about JUUL.
Thirty-something people who were smokers all switched over to the JUUL.
[Eschenbach] A friend saying, "I tried this and it really is great,"
that's the best marketing and advertising you can get.
You can't beat that.
But that kind of word of mouth takes time.
[Lorenz] A marketing campaign that you do in 2015,
you might not see those sales numbers until 2016.
But a year to mass adoption is actually extremely quick.
JUUL took a product that was previously considered cringy,
and made it into this cool, aspirational, awesome thing
that everyone had to have. This party accessory almost.
[sucking in]
I would say the draw from this
is as close to a cigarette as you'll get from something electronic.
Being influenced is easy, especially if you tell someone "this is cool,"
and they see it and say, "You're right, it is."
Then they start using it and it spreads like wildfire from there.
[upbeat music continues]
[Pierce] For me, it was when I walked around the streets of Silicon Valley,
and San Francisco,
and it felt like two out of every three people you passed were JUULing.
And then, pretty quickly, it started to be truly everywhere.
[Rougeau] Everyone saw Dave Chappelle's stand-up, and he was using it.
They didn't reach out to him. They didn't pay him.
He was just using it all on his own.
You want to hit my vape pen?
Sorry, nigga.
I'm trying not to get herpes. My bad.
[Pierce] There were a bunch of celebrities
posting about it on Instagram in a way that felt genuine,
which is the dream for a company like that.
That if you can just get into the right handful of places, you're good.
[Rougeau] We were thrilled when we saw that people
that were influencers were loving JUUL.
[Pierce] It's amazing how little of that it takes from the right set of people
to make a campaign like that take off.
Because as soon as a handful of celebrities do it,
that means you've now exposed your product and your idea to everybody.
The Vaporized campaign, I think it's brilliant marketing.
It's textbook marketing.
You know, you seed the conversation, and you seed the influencers,
and you sit back, and you watch the masses take notice.
But JUUL's first impression will forever be known
as a brand that tried to recruit the next generation of nicotine addicts.
[Pierce] JUUL ran ads that looked exactly like what you would do
if you're Apple and you're making a vaporizer.
They had people who looked cool, doing cool stuff, with JUULs.
It wasn't a deep, serious dive
into how they improved the experience of ingesting nicotine.
It was lifestyle ads.
What your life could look like if only you had this in your life.
They did not go into this
with regard for the side effects of that sort of marketing.
They saw this as just another tech product.
And it's not another tech product. It's a nicotine product.
Had JUUL decided to hire somebody from the tobacco industry,
that person likely would have immediately sent up red flags and said, "No."
[Steven Parrish] With 20/20 hindsight, what I would say to them
is take the marketing plan
that you learned how to do when you were in business school,
and throw it away.
Because you don't make widgets,
you make a product that has nicotine in it.
James and Adam didn't totally understand that.
[Pierce] I've been conflicted about my role in all of this, over time.
I wrote an article a lot of people read
saying this was the iPhone of e-cigarettes,
which is not a small thing to say.
I think I was right, in retrospect, but did I help that be right? Probably.
And I think, as a tech reporter,
it would have been easy enough for me to leave it alone
and say, "This is not fundamentally a tech product."
"This is somebody trying to make tech out of something else."
And a thing I didn't realize at the time, that I wish I had,
was their goal was not to make people quit smoking.
Their goal was to make people start JUULing.
And I never asked the question, and I wish I had,
"What if this works? What if everyone does start JUULing?"
"Then what?"
["Where's my JUUL??" by Full Tac and Lil Mariko playing]
[Casselman] I don't think anyone could have anticipated how many children
would want this product.
♪ Where's my JUUL? ♪
[Lorenz] First impressions are everything on internet,
so when you put the JUUL campaign into the world,
it's like releasing a genie. There's no going back.
♪ Where's my JUUL? ♪
♪ So not cool! ♪
♪ Where's my JUUL? ♪
[closing theme music playing]