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The Incendiary Rise of Juul
by Jamie Ducharme
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After graduating from Kenyon in 2002 with dual degrees in physics and studio art, James returned home to St. Louis to try his hand at product design. He worked at a company called Metaphase Design Group, which specialized in ergonomically friendly products. Despite his youth and inexperience, James's talent and charisma were obvious immediately. "James is a very inspiring designer whose interests, abilities and skills are beyond his years," a coworker gushed on James's LinkedIn page, adding that he "possesses an entrepreneurial flair that sparks innovation and discovery." After about a year in the workforce, James decided to explore that flair. He packed his bags and headed west to the manicured lawns and terra-cotta roofs of Stanford's California campus to study product design.
Adam and James did not have the world's most obvious friendship. Adam was studious and low-key, prone to getting lost in thought; James was boisterous and social, always cracking jokes and erupting into his signature loud, barking laugh. Adam listened more than he spoke, while James was happy to fill the silence. Both men still looked like undergrads back then, with shaggy haircuts—Adam's dirty blond, James's brown—but Adam's dark eyes, deep voice, and long, angular face gave him a certain gravity next to bearded, baby-faced James. Or maybe it was more about how he acted than how he looked. Adam was consistently described as "stoic," a word often tossed around in Silicon Valley circles that value drive and hard work. James was harder to put a label on. He had an infectious laugh and a glint in his eye, but both could disappear in an instant.
Still, the pair had enough in common to strike up a friendship. Both were bright and talented, with a clear gift for and lifelong pull toward product design. Both loved solving complex problems and figuring out what makes things tick. Both tended to work in late-night, marathon brainstorming sessions. And, though both had tried to quit smoking before, both were frequently bumming cigarettes and hanging around outside the Design Loft, shooting the breeze and lighting up. It was during one of these smoke breaks, on that winter night in 2004, that Adam and James realized they didn't want to burn sticks anymore. All those years of loving and hating smoking in equal measure had crystallized into one moment of recognition: enough was enough. If they couldn't find a way to quit smoking, they would invent one for themselves.
As existential crises go, theirs was a well-timed one. It was thesis season at Stanford, and a cigarette alternative seemed like a great idea for a project. (Previously, both men were working on projects that involved furniture. Adam was designing a desk that could be folded up without needing to be cleared of its clutter, while James was plugging away at user-adaptable chairs.) After their smoky epiphany outside the design center, the pair began brainstorming and trading emails about how they could design a product for people like them: people who wanted to ditch cigarettes but hadn't had luck with the stale and largely ineffective cessation products currently on the market, like nicotine gums and patches; people who couldn't or didn't want to stop cold turkey; people who didn't want the stigma and risk that came with smoking, but who also didn't want to lose the sensory, social, and ritualistic elements of the habit. "What we realized was this was kind of a false choice, this 'quit or die' mentality," Adam recalled in a 2019 interview. "It wasn't that I really wanted to quit; I just wanted to minimize the harm from smoking."
With about six months left before they had to present their theses, both men began pouring their collective energy into their new idea. They began surveying people on campus about everything they hated, and loved, about smoking. They found that their classmates, like many smokers, were conflicted. In interviews, they told Adam and James that they loved the ritual of smoking, the way it looked, even the elegant way smoke unfurled from the cigarette and the sound of taking a drag. But they hated the smell, the stigma, and the knowledge that the habit could someday kill them. Adam and James began taking apart and rebuilding every tobacco product they could find, searching for a way to get rid of the bad parts of smoking without losing the things people liked.
Excerpted from Big Vape by Jamie Ducharme. Copyright © 2021 by Jamie Ducharme. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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