Supreme Cutting Colours
Supreme, the company behind 88 Vape, is acting to shore up share value and combat possible legislation by removing bright colours and certain descriptors from its products
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by Dave Cross
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Supreme announced its outline for a “series of proactive measures within our vaping division, 88vape, with the intent to mitigate the growing rise of underage vaping. We are fully committed to eradicating underage vaping and outline that our core objective has and always will be to support adult smokers to have an affordable and safer alternative to smoking.
The company continued: “As an industry leader, and to ensure our brands do not create any interest from underage vapers, we announce the following pro-active measures over the coming months, which we believe should be adopted across the UK market. We are delighted to announce our proposed changes.”
Luc Badain, Sales Director for Supreme Imports Ltd, detailed the five-point plan:
- Plain packaging: Packaging across our entire range of 88vape disposables and 10ml liquids are currently being assessed to ensure the use of colour is very limited and the packaging is plain and uniform. We will ensure that the shopper’s experience is not impacted, and the use of colour will be present only to ensure the consumer is able to distinguish one stock item from another.
- Disposables: 88vape bright coloured disposables will be switched to either plain black, white, or grey hardware with bright colours discontinued at the earliest convenience.
- Flavours: The naming of flavours will be simplified, for example “Peach Dream” will become “Peach” and “Fruit Crush” will become “Fruit” to avoid any risk of children to be interested in the flavour. Any flavours perceived to be appealing to children will be removed entirely from our range.
- Age verification protocols: Supreme will increase its due diligence to ensure all our retailers and e-tailers in its network to ensure that they have robust age verification protocols in place. We will no longer trade with those that cannot comply with this requirement.
- Store location: We strongly recommend to our retailers that vaping products are not located where they can be easily accessed or come into contact with children. Our current plan is for this to come as a soft change meaning no changes to barcode or cost prices. Where products are changing name, we will feature both old flavour and new flavour name on the CDU to help with the short-term merchandising instore. We will be in contact over the coming weeks to arrange a meeting to share our plans in more detail.
Following the Government’s announcement to explore the possibility of banning disposable vapes, shares in Supreme PLC (AIM:SUP) dropped from a high of 130p in September to 113p. The decline continued and bottomed out at 91.5p. Shares have rallied, up to 103.75 – representing a 20% drop in value thanks to the disposables ban threat.
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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