01x02 - First Impressions

[bunniefuu]

[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]

[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 f*ck

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 f*cking 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 sh**t.

[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 sh**t.

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 ex*cuted 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 sh*ts 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, f*ck 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 sh*ts,

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 dr*gs,

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 k*lling 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 b*at 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, n*gga.

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? ♪

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? ♪

♪ Where's my JUUL? ♪

So not cool! ♪

♪ Where's my JUUL? ♪

[closing theme music playing]