Eliquid Firm In Stock Market Floatation
A businessman who gave away a Bentley leads his vape liquid company to stock market floatation.
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by Dave Cross
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Supreme Imports was started in 1975, but it fell upon hard times by 2007. Iain Johnston came in to help turn the company around when it entered administration. The founder’s grandson (and now Managing Director) Sandy Chadha promised Johnston his £130,000 Bentley if the company made at least a million pounds profit per year once it was financially stable again. Within ten years, Johnston was given the car’s V5.
It all started with an accidental entry into battery reselling. Chadha attended a trade show to liquidate stock. He recalled: “When I did that show, somebody, just by complete chance, gave us some Duracell batteries and said ‘I’ve got about £1,000 worth of these that I need to get rid of. Can I leave them on your stand and if you get any orders you can buy them from me? And I thought, there’s no harm in that, so I put them on display. There were just a few packets of Duracell batteries on the stand, but we got a lot of orders, like £30–40,000 worth, which, in those days, was a phenomenal amount of interest for us.”
The company now sells more than 200m batteries, 65m lightbulbs and 1m light fittings each year, through major supermarket chains and with almost a fifth of sales going overseas. Plus, the owners had the foresight to enter the vaping market and own the KIK and Vape88 brands.
In the tax year to March 31 2017, Supreme made £6.9m pre-tax profit from a £71m turnover. These figures were up from £6m and £59m in 2016.
Part of the success story has been the investment made in a juice producing and packaging facility. The company says: “We have taken the step from being a successful Brand Owner and Importer to high quality Manufacturer in the UK.”
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“Our purpose built facility was developed to incorporate state of the art technology and is run by a highly qualified and experienced team that thrive on delivering quality products. Our onsite biochemists create all our liquid formulations using UK sourced pharmaceutical grade propylene glycol, vegetable glycerine and nicotine, which allows us full traceability on every bottle. Nicotine analysis is also carried out at our in-house titration testing facility.”
The stock market listing hopes to raise £10-million; some of the proceeds are planned for reinvestment into a new manufacturing facility.
Photo Credit:
Banner image from Supreme Imports
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous vape companies to develop content for their websites.
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