Need an investor for my E-juice E-cig company



-joe- said:
Plenty of people in the e-liquid market who do just that. One of my favourites, that's become pretty successful: Hello and welcome to | Grant's Vanilla Custard

Raw materials I've already added up. Bottles, just had a look on ebay, £250 for 1000 100ml ones. Packaging, generally not a lot. I've yet to receive an eliquid that's been anything other than the bottle in a padded envelope.

Design doesn't need to be much, again, haven't seen much in this regard, all very very simple, could be done by an amateur in 5 minutes in photoshop. If you wanted something that would kick everyone else's asses, an extra $200 on top of the web design, plus maybe some very minor edits in photoshop would be fine. Printing, just measured the label on a nearby 100ml bottle, 160mm x 50mm, so ~£40 for 1000 labels.

Promotions, sure, I understand you can't put a static value on those, but overall, all those costs added up are somewhere around $2800 (guesstimating currency conversion roughly), which leaves $7.2k for promotions and miscellaneous expenses in the space of the first three weeks. Bottling shouldn't be too much of a problem at this stage and with those margins. All costs for anything physical are based on the cost of buying from eBay, if you went through the normal channels, obviously they'd be lower.

It shouldn't take more than 2 minutes to fill and label a bottle, perhaps a little more if you're adding foil (not sure what the process is for that).
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Sorry, used to far better than that. I believe first impressions are everything in this kind of a market and I wouldn't be doing a hand labelled bottle in a padded envelope, that's for fucking sure. Just like I don't want the word "dead" associated with anything I smoke, I also don't want the product to look like it came from some clandestine laboratory cooked up by a bunch of amateurs.

I would expect bottles to come factory sealed, professionally labelled, boxed, with literature. Otherwise you can kiss a lot of repeat customers goodbye. That requires a bigger budget for design, prepress, dies, and production.

Quality printing doesn't come cheap.
 
1. Trade mark question. 2 of the biggest juice companies out there right now are suicide bunny and space jam.. BOTH are multi million dollar companies.. guess where both of those names are from? THOSE are far more blatant rip offs then the name i chose yet there still chugging along making a shit ton of money.. The E-cig industry right now is heavily UNREG right now.. things are changing but its about 2 years away as the feds are trying to catch up.

2. Point two on the trademark.. You cant trademark a word like WATER.. the walking dead predates all this shit for a long time. Not to mention the name is Walking dead vapors which is clearly related to the industry im in.. so essentially everyone is saying.. if a show comes out named zombies.. then no one ever can have something called ZOMBIE VAPORS because time warner has a show on tv called zombie.. and point 3 refer back to point 1 which is if million dollar juice company like space jam is getting away with it then im sure my little company like mine is far from anybody radar.. and if it does get to a million dollar point and iv made that much money and i have to change the name of the company or even shut it down.. thats okay ill bank and move on..

3. Joe - actually i appreciated your post. i honestly thought the same thing.. but couple of things you forgot. The juice needs to steep so we had to buy steepers.. those things arent cheap. so let me list the things you forgot as well i did when i first invested.

1. Nicotine.. this isnt cheap..and you have to buy lots of it
2. Labeling the bottles requires manual labor or you can buy a labeling machine which isnt cheap.
3. Setting up a clean room to make your juice.. lots of poeple do start experimentation's in there moms basement but at some point to make thousands of bottle you need a clean room. had to pay for that.
4. Trade shows and the costs involved. for example we just went to vegas.. We gave out samples and took down information from 50 shops around the country.. the whole trip, the booth, the gas, car rental etc alone cost me 2k.
5. free samples for stores.. the way to get your juice in stores is to send out samples all over the place.. the cost in gas or shipping the the bottles isnt cheap when your trying to do it 100 times over.
6. posters and flavor menus and art.. posters alone cost us 700 dollars to make.. flavour menus for all the stores and as well as promotional item cost a lot.. had to pay for the art of my character... needed 450 dollar camera to shoot good quality shit..
7. a bunch of other shit that im not going to even mention..

-jerry i have my own Retail store.. but my juice is in about 10 shops now across the country... and in talks with 5 more right now.. and just today had another 2 hit me up. The problem isnt the amount of stores the problem is full filling the orders FROM the stores.. The reason is our juice is really good and selling fast. one store has reordered from us 4 times in the past month or so. as far as proprietary.. OUR JUICE formula is.. our brand is.. we have a character name zack with a whole background story written for him. we are shooting 5 minute short horror movies involving zack. all of this is being promoted on social media and people are eating it up.

Nickstar- thank you it actually was a genuise move.. with all the e-juice companies coming out.. besides every person being able to make there own juice.. we had to set our selves apart.. In an industry where half the people who vape do it as a hobby.. are comic book fans.. horror movie fans.. all around general gadget fans.. i cant tell you how many people love our walking dead vapors poster or the zacks art we did.. or the t-shirts were printing.. or story we wrote.. people are eating it up!


Gimmedat - banking 5-6 thousand a month on a store thats 6 months old isnt something i can sell.. sorry man but thats a lot of money for me.. i know its probably peasantry for you but im going to have my full investment back on the store in sept of this year... not even a full year.. that means i dont have to be at the shop and any dollar i make thats net profit i can put in my pocket after sept. sorry man just cant sell a business like that.

that being said.. your right.. the profit margins are insane on the juice.. its been about a month or so of selling ejuice and iv made half my investment back. its fucking crazy.

galacon- your amazing mate.. but i would rather gouge my eyes out then take you as investor.. i can just imagine our first meeting.

Me - galacon i just sold 1k bottles to 5 different shops!! yes!!
Galacon - WHAT!!? 1k fucking mother fucking bottles? are you fucking retarded? did you fucking get aspergers before you got to work? THATS ALL you have sold. are you fucking wasting my time? tell me why i shouldn't fucking gut you like a fish right now.. just tell me.. now go out there and sell 1 million bottles by 9 am tomorrow or i will shove 5 foot wide anal plug that i use on my gf up your ass.. get it? got it? good!

final note- I honestly dont mind the criticism from fellow posters in this thread. with people like grunnin and ceosam threads.. its easy to become suspicious and or critical of people. Also i apologize english isnt my first language.
 
Here's what I'd do:

1. Get all your financials as well as projections organized. Have bank statements, orders from stores, etc. in a nice and presentable format.
2. Go to every single bank in your area asking for a loan backed by future revenue/receivables.
3. Hire someone to run the store full-time. If you're making $6-8k a month, then pay up to that $8k for the business to operate without you.
4. Use the bank's loan money to concentrate full-time on the e-juice business.

After that, there's two options:
1. Your e-juice company succeeds -- fuck yeah, you're rich.
2. It fails -- in that case you fire the people you hired in step #3 and go back to making $6-8k to pay off the loan. You'll be fine.

...and quit the fucking SEO jobs!

Good luck!
 
Also: Prepare for a lawsuit. It will happen eventually.

However, there are a lot of companies that started out infringing and turned into a success after.

True, the lawsuit is a liability, however the relationships that you build with customers and store owners will likely outweigh the cost. Assuming you're forced to change the name, the transition shouldn't be too bad if you have a quality product.
 
im having a graphic novel zombie story written for it that comes out in chapters on our website. poeple have loved the story so far. we are shooting a 5 minute zombie movie teaser on a great movie type camera and and it looks awesome. we have zombie posters and the vape community is eating this shit up.. for example we shoot a scene with a zombie for 3 seconds teaser then go " ZOMBIE BLOOD JUICE " and post that shit on isntagram and people eat it up.. within a few hours we have bunch of likes and comments.. our instagram isnt even a few weeks old and has almost approx 2k real followers
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How much revenue is this getting you? This is a lot of time, effort, and presumably, money.
 
Pheasant said:
You're coming out with a Walking Dead graphic novel...?

Pepper your angus.
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The name of the novel on our website is "Zack" named after the character on our bottle and it has NOTHING to do with the The walking dead show on amc. Completely different characters compltely different story theme.. related to ecigs.. guys the amc show The walking dead didnt invent zombies.. or zombie stories or EVEN THE TERM walking dead.. these things have been around for a long time.
 
gattaca said:
The name of the novel on our website is "Zack" named after the character on our bottle and it has NOTHING to do with the The walking dead show on amc. Completely different characters compltely different story theme.. related to ecigs.. guys the amc show The walking dead didnt invent zombies.. or zombie stories or EVEN THE TERM walking dead.. these things have been around for a long time.
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You do realize the Walking Dead show is based on a popular graphic novel right? You're absolutely correct tho, if we ignore the fact that your graphic novel is about zombies and promoting a brand called Walking Dead there are no similarities.
 
gattaca said:
The name of the novel on our website is "Zack" named after the character on our bottle and it has NOTHING to do with the The walking dead show on amc. Completely different characters compltely different story theme.. related to ecigs.. guys the amc show The walking dead didnt invent zombies.. or zombie stories or EVEN THE TERM walking dead.. these things have been around for a long time.
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Do you really want to get into a legal battle with AMC? Trademark infringement is some of the most costly litigation to get involved in.

Have you even gone through some of their trademarks?

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I'm willing to bet if you create something called WALKING DEAD vapors and have a comic book type story along with it, they will come after you.

You really need to speak with a trademark attorney before you waste any money doing this.
 
why can't you just change the name man?

its not that good... just change it to google vapors and make a search engine to go with it
 
gattaca said:
-jerry i have my own Retail store.. but my juice is in about 10 shops now across the country... and in talks with 5 more right now.. and just today had another 2 hit me up. The problem isnt the amount of stores the problem is full filling the orders FROM the stores.. The reason is our juice is really good and selling fast. one store has reordered from us 4 times in the past month or so.
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So get some PO orders, and take them to the bank. What's the issue?

And do you really want an investor from WF?

Maybe go find someone who was mining bitcoins back in like 2009, and has 80,000 of them just sitting around.
 
Someone inventing a term means fuckall. It's the person that trademarks it, that has the legal right to it's usage.

Space Jam was a almost a 2 decade old movie (that still houses a shitty 1996 website on WB servers ). There's little to zero hope of Warner Bros renewing that franchise.

And with the current market scenario, they will not bother maligning their image by going against a company set against an extremely different backdrop.

Suicide Bunny doesn't even return a single trademark result.

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Whereas Walking Dead is a live franchise, with multiple marketing and PR teams working round the clock for it. It is extremely successful and enjoys a ginormous fan following.

Launching with the same name, amidst a live teaser/PR campaign is simply you riding the wave. You are essentially clashing with the titans here. You are disrupting their game.

Your justifications are merely consolations for your own conscience in this case. Try narrating that Zombie analogy to the Judge, while the WD lawyers are busy tearing you a new one. It doesn't work that way.

Remember, if they decide to go after you in a trademark infringement suit, they won't merely attack you - they will go after your business and everything you stand for.

//

Me and some other members here had a chance to witness a meltdown of a member who infringed on the Disney trademark with similar justifications. Just as he was starting to gain some traction, Disney shut him off. #TrueStory

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The fact of the matter is that you're at a very early stage. You've got a good business going, you believe in your product, you have the production perfected, you also have a good know-how of the industry, the market seems to be eating up your product - which means it is good.

So why are you so hell bent on creating a potential legal hurdle for yourself? Why can't you be something like Cosmic Fog or Tasty Cloud? You want to create a Zombie theme, go ahead, by all means. Release a "Dead or Alive" flavor - and promote it.

TL;DR - Change that name or pepper your angus!
 
I actually kind of like the name... if you're still around when I buy my e-cigs later this month I'll probably end up picking up some juice. Also if you get sued, please make a thread about and post how the proceedings are going under an alternate account.
 
gattaca said:
the store is not doing bad.. lots of competition but we did about 24k in gross sales last month with about 13k of that profit..then 3500 in rent and electricity and another 2k in labor im putting a good 6-8 in my pocket every month..
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That accounting, this is not how invest-able business operate.

Also, where did you find a copy of Frontpage 98'?
 
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