Fast Company - Dec18Jan19

JUUL IN THE ROUGH

batteries. Plus, they often mimicked the iconography of cigarettes—round tube,
glowing tip—but didn’t taste or smell as good. “[Big tobacco] had been trying to
build a safer cigarette, and that’s not what anyone wanted,” says Monsees. He and
Bowen realized that “people wanted to move past cigarettes.” A video of the pair’s

2005 thesis presentation at Stanford shows Bowen unveiling their prototype, called the Ploom, to professors and classmates. Through elevated design, he explains, it should be possible to “take tobacco back to being a luxury good and not so much a drug delivery device that cigarettes have become.” The presentation includes flmed endorsements from beta users—all cigarette smokers.

“The orthodoxy in a lot of the smoking stuff is, you just quit, man up, cold turkey,” says their thesis adviser, Michael Barry, who today is a Stanford adjunct and founder of Quotient, a design consultancy. “And if you fail, you’re weak.” (Less than 5% of smokers who try to quit abruptly are successful.) The sense of shame that results is “literally the kiss of death for any kind of behavior change.” Early studies suggest that e-cigarettes, which are not nearly as deadly as combustible cigarettes, offer an effective alternative. In the U.K., offcials at Public Health England have gone so far as to laud e-cigarettes as “the nation’s favourite stop smoking aid,” having helped an estimated 1. 5 million people successfully kick the habit.

After graduating, Bowen and Monsees began to turn their vision into a business, launching Ploom and later Pax, a vaporizer for loose-leaf tobacco and marijuana. Both products refected their view that smoking needed to be reinvented for a wellness-focused generation, not eradicated. Then, in 2015, a decade after leaving Stanford, they turned their focus to a form of liquid nicotine called nicotine salts and unveiled a sleek, rectangular e-cigarette with a name beftting their original luxury aspirations: Juul.

By almost every measure, Juul has succeeded in creating the type of compel-
ling new ritual that Bowen and Monsees envisioned. Last year, parent company
Juul Labs sold 16. 2 million vapes—that’s $245 million worth of its $35 devices
and $16 pods, which come four to a pack in favors including mint and mango. In

2018, sales will easily surpass $1 billion. Today, Juul controls more than 70% of the U. S. e-cigarette market. A July fundraising round, which generated $1.25 billion in growth equity, valued the company at more than $16 billion, and it has started expanding into Canada, Israel, and the U. K. Bowen and Monsees, who today serve as Juul’s chief technology offcer and chief product offcer, respectively, are now paper billionaires helping to oversee 1,000 employees, a robust R&D lab, and one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history.

They are also in the center of a vape-cloud maelstrom. In the past nine months, Juul has been hit with several lawsuits—including a nationwide class action suit—claiming that the company deceptively marketed its e-cigarettes as safe and targeted minors with lifestyle-based ad campaigns. The FDA launched a formal investigation into the company’s marketing practices this past spring,

as stanford grad students, bowen and monsees begin building an e-cigarete prototype out of foam, observing how smokers respond to different shapes. they hack together a fnal product by borrowing parts from butane lighters and other devices.

HOW ADAM BOWEN AND JAMES MONSEES WENT FROM STANFORD DESIGN STUDENTS TO FOUNDERS OF ONE OF THE COUN TRY’S MOS T highly valued—and notorious—startups

TAKING THEIR SEATS

across from me in a conference room at their airy red-brick headquarters in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood on a brisk August morning, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, cofounders of the breakout e-cigarette company Juul, lay their smartphones and vapes on the table and begin recounting their Silicon Valley origin story.

It begins more than a decade ago: before the lawsuits and the FDA investigations; before the accusations that their company had unleashed an epidemic of teenage vaping on the country; before regulators, legislators, teachers, parents, and even some devoted users began looking at Juul—with its pocket-friendly design and playfully favored nicotine pods—as a high-tech, highly addictive second coming of Philip Morris. Bowen and Monsees were simply two graduate students—Bowen, clean-shaven and studious; Monsees, bearded and gregarious—who met in Stanford’s product design program in

2002 and bonded, during late-night working
sessions, over an idea that could save mil-
lions of lives and disrupt one of the world’s
most powerful industries.
“Look, smoking hasn’t evolved in 100

years,” Bowen says, recalling the pitch to
their thesis advisers. “It’s killing millions of
people. We’re smokers. We’re at risk of suf-
fering the same fate, and we want to work
on this: How do you create a new ritual to
replace the old one?”
Early e-cigarette models, such as R.J. Reyn-
olds’s “Premier,” which launched in 1988, had
failed to win over large numbers of smokers
because their nicotine levels were too low and
they relied on clunky technology and weak