Flavorah

[Heather]

Heather - did you call them?

No I didn't. I will try that tomorrow.

 

[slushpuppy77]

Hey! This is Brendan at Flavorah (Shoreline is my handle) Thanks Zanaspus for opening this thread and hazozita, Lirruping and RocketPuppy for throwing all those questions out there. I’ll do my best to answer them all and give you an idea of who/what we are about! This might be a long post, so I will try to make it as organized as possible so that you can learn what you want.

The first question, where do our flavors come from
Lirruping was correctl, all of our flavors are manufactured and blended by Mother Murphy’s in Greensboro North Carolina. I understand how our “About Us” page caused some confusion, especially the line “Chances are if you have ever purchased a disposable ecigarette from one of the two leading brands, or vaped ejuice in the past year, then you have tasted some of our flavors.”

Mother Murphy’s (MM’s) is an industrial flavor manufacturer that has been around for three generations. They sell flavoring by the barrel for all sorts of uses like food, beverages, tobacco, and in the last several years ejuice. For a sense of scale, their minimum quantity of concentrated flavoring is enough to flavor about 80 gallons of ejuice. They are still family owned and operated.

Mother Murphy’s Lab is inspected by the USDA and adheres to all of the highest standards you would expect from a company selling industrial quantities of flavoring. Check out their website if you are curious, www.mothermurphys.com.

Perhaps the best explanation of Flavorah as a business is that we are a distributor and packager of MM flavorings for DIY ejuice: We are taking the materials manufactured by a big company, and packaging and marketing them for a relatively small segment of their market.

Unfortunately I do not have permission to release who else uses Mother Murphy's in the vaping world, but I will point out that 1) they (MM’s) are located in the heart of tobacco country and have a flavor room there for the industry to use 2) they make juice for several of the largest disposable ecig manufacturers and ejuice distributors, and 3) they typically sell ejuice and flavorings by the barrel (a barrel contains over 200,000ml).

I'll explain how I got started with Flavorah

Flavorah was started in 2013, but did not launch until 2015. If it was not for one of my friends being a Murphy, I would not have been able to start Flavorah as a business.

Here is the story, In Spring of 2013, I was stationed in Quantico Virginia with the Marine Corps. I was hanging out with a friend talking about business opportunities when I got off active duty. He worked for his family business selling flavoring and I thought there ought to be a market for selling smaller quantities of those flavorings online too. I started doing research into the market for retail-size quantities of artificial flavor. This is when I discovered vaping. Initially I learned about vaping by purchasing ecigs and giving them to friends in the Marine Corps. They loved them (mostly clones and refillable cartomizers) and I had a hard time getting them back.

When I started learning about DIY ejuice, there were people on several forums trying out all kinds of things in order to flavor their ejuice. There were not a lot of good vendors, and some people would get their PG from crazy places like Walgreens or Walmart where PG was sold as a laxative. Homemade extractions or flavor & scent drops bought at the grocery store were acceptable starting points for experiments some people were posting online...it seemed like the best options for new flavors was to guess and try and post online what you learned.

After discovering and being fascinated by the underground movement of vaping, I put 2&2 together with my friend who had the flavors, and decided to start something to serve the vaping community with flavoring after I was released from active duty.

Last year I attended the NATO Tobacco show in Las Vegas with some of the guys from MM’s in order to get a lay of the land. Everyone at the show was talking about immanent FDA regulations for ejuice and vaping, plus potential taxes and regulations. Surprisingly there was no DIY ejuice flavoring for sale. The closest thing was Tasty Puff for dripping on your tobacco or gonja.

What they did have a lot of at the Vegas show, however, was Roll-Your-Own tobacco. It seemed to me at the time that DIY Ejuice could end up growing in the future due to taxes and regulations in the same way as Roll-your-Own tobacco has.

When I moved home to Washington State in 2014, the legislature tried to pass a bill taxing ejuice and hardware 95%. I attended the protest rally in Olympia our state capitol with a friend who had recently quit smoking by switching over to vaping. That week I also contacted a guy I knew in the state legislature who was sponsoring the bill to give him my 2cents. Fortunately the bill was defeated, but the threat to vaping was really obvious.

At that point I started the process of importing a filling, plugging and capping machine so that I could start serving the DIY community with concentrated flavoring. While waiting for it to arrive, I secured 2,400 feet of commercial space to set up our production and fulfillment operation.

What Flavorah does

Our flavors are mixed at MM’s lab. We get the large container from them and use a pharma type peristaltic pump on our machine in Seattle to draw the flavoring from its container and pump the measured amount into the 15ml bottle we use for packaging. From there it gets the plastic plug and cap put on. Then the label is applied separately by a different automatic machine. I’ll try to post a video of this process soon; it reminds me of the TV Series, “How its made.”

As a startup, we are essentially entering the market after the proverbial “dust has settled” and designing our product from the ground up for vaping. As you probably know from being part of this forum, a lot of the flavors that people have ended up using for DIY over the last couple years were never intended for ejuice, but because MM is willing to work with us, and others in the vaping market we are getting better and better results.

For instance, I have been working directly with MM’s to give Flavorah an edge when dealing with Diacetyl, Acetyl Propionyl, and Acetoin. They have done the research and we (Flavorah) are hoping to eliminate these completely from some of our flavors this year, and to add new flavors that are D/A/AP free for vapor.

Flavorah’s approach for DIY ejuice

As a small business, I really want us to start off with excellent customer service, and maintain that responsiveness. That means I do not want to grow faster than we can manage.

To accomplish that, we have started with one size offering (15ml), and 21 flavors that vape REALLY well. I want people to try our stuff and immediately say, “'holy cow,' this is amazing!"

There are some critical challenges, like packaging and shipping, as we grow and I really want to avoid getting “Flamed” by an unhappy member of the community.

I want you to know that we are here to serve the DIY community. If you EVER order from us and receive a leaking bottle, the wrong flavor, or something that you did not want, then contact me and we will send a replacement immediately. Also, feedback about what flavors you want to see in the future is really helpful. I am making a list right now as a matter of fact

In regards to shipping, since our flavors are undiluted, they are often also a Category III hazmat (flammable) liquid. We are able to ship them with the USPS under a small quantity exemption for plastic bottles 0ml. This is also the reason why we cannot ship to Europe without paying $100/parcel right now.

Deals

People are aware of the Flavorah Reddit promo we did. That was after after reaching out to Botboy and KirkT on the DIY ejuice subreddit for ideas several weeks ahead of time. What do people want for a VU promo? Currently it is VUG which gives you free samples, but you are welcome to use the reddit promo too. In the future when we release new flavors, I will post a promo code for them here on VU.

Are you ever going to get back to your customers? Ignoring customers is a big no no.

 

[alee132]

I made order and actually was happy except one bottle had come with significant amount leaked out of the 15ml banana. It says right on packing slip to contact them if it happens. So I tried. Email. Request tickets. Facebook. No reply in over 72 hours now. Getting a little upset now.

 

[Smoky Blue]

Give them a bit, they have been busy..

 

[alee132]

Give them a bit, they have been busy..

I guess its part of growing pains for them. They need to hire someone for customer service asap.

 

[lirruping]

I guess its part of growing pains for them. They need to hire someone for customer service asap.

I know it can be annoying/frustrating to wait and wonder, but they've been quite accommodating in the long run to me when that happened and I've heard others say the same. I'm sure they will replace your product +