AYR_
A $700bn market in the process of disruption, and a company with a vision how to get a billion customers to make that switch.
The legacy_
Over 200 years ago a guy from Whitechapel opened his first shop on Bond Street, and when the business landed in America, he found everyone chewing and spitting tobacco on the street. Within 10 years, Phillip Morris [the man] convinced a change in format, and the number one tobacco market went from chewing tobacco to smoking cut cigarettes.
Transformation_
From the gramophone to the cassette player, to the CD and ultimately the iPod, change has been driven when innovation has embraced the things we love, making adoption as seamless as possible. These disruptions have honoured the way we do things, and in doing so, they have come to shape their industries.
The opportunity_
When the iPod came out in 2001, it didn’t just seek to be the best MP3 player; it redefined the music business as it was. It changed the way people engaged with music. Now we are asking the same question of an industry that is more than 40 times larger than the music industry at its height: the tobacco industry.
The challenge is, how could you make vaping as easy to use and as familiar as smoking? Is it possible to create the iPod of vaping? We are asking this question, having assembled one of the most talented, multi-disciplinary teams to answer the call. We have partnered with one of the world’s largest manufacturers of the Internet of Things – from Apple Headphones, Google Nest, to Sonos – to bring our first product to market.
We have asked thousands of smokers what’s so sublime about smoking. And by reimagining vaping, we have reinvented this ritual around the principles that smokers love. Along the way, we have created one of the world’s leading patent portfolios in the category.
So, we didn’t simply set out to invent the smartest vaporiser. Our mission has been to bring about the end of cigarettes…and to do so on a platform that has been publicly backed by the Royal College of Physicians, Public Health England, and the National Health Service.
