TVape Produces Canada’s Leading Vaporizer Brands

TVape CEO Nima Noori shares details of the company’s product line and technical innovations. Noori explains that the company utilizes consumer feedback when developing products and creates inventive offerings like its disposable cartridge system. TVape doubled its sales in October and Noori believes the company can continue that trend going forward. The company’s top 2 vaporizer brands are among the top 5 vaporizer brands in Canada. TVape has an international footprint and its German subsidiary is capturing the European market. The company’s broad product portfolio allows TVape to enter any market more easily than other cannabis companies. TVape is very profitable right now; consequently, Noori has no plans to take the company public but is interested in strategic private partnerships and is represented by AltaCorp Capital.

Transcript:

Narrator: TVape is a vertically integrated business model that’s been selling vaporizers online and in stores for over six years. They offer high quality vaporizers with company branding. CEO Nima Noori founded the company on a $2,000 credit card close to a decade ago.

TVape sells a wide range of products, including portable and desktop vapes, as well as accessories and parts.

Benjamin A. Smith: So we’re back with the CEO of TVape, Mr. Nima Noori. Nima, welcome to the program.

Nima Noori:   Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. TVape would be the correct pronunciation, but I know it’s a difficult name.

Benjamin A. Smith: It is, it is. Sort of has TV and Vape sort of mixed in one, so I’m not used to that. No, I know you brought some samplers here. What do you have to show us today?

Nima Noori:   Okay, so the one that I have out here, there’s much more in the back, but I have the Arc, which was released about 10 days after legalization day. So we planned that a good three, three and a half years beforehand. And the unit was finished and published and released, basically, on the 1^st of November, and it was really, really – it was our best release so far, and we do release a lot of vaporizers throughout the year. And that one sold out on the first day, the GT.

Benjamin A. Smith: Okay. So this vaporizer, you made yourself? You designed and developed it, or worked in tandem with a partner to design and develop your own vape?

Nima Noori:   So basically, TVape is the tip of the iceberg that is visible from the outside. We have basically Thermodyne Systems that is stationed in Germany; that’s Thermodyne Systems GMBH, and we have Thermodyne Systems in Canada as well. So basically our engineering arm, and Zeus is another business unit of our company, and of course it was all developed in-house, and it was done so from the beginning with customer feedback survey data, focus groups, and so on and so forth. So when you look at it, it wasn’t great ideas of one guy or another; it was a work –

Benjamin A. Smith: Collaboration.

Nima Noori:   Exactly.

Benjamin A. Smith: Okay. So that brings me to my next question: I’ve always wanted to know, how far can vape technology go? Is it something where the technology can only go so far and it’s done a certain way and you can only really improve the design a little bit, or do you expect more features and more, you know, operational features on these products going forward that can really have an improved performance?

Nima Noori:   So that’s a great question. It’s a very loaded question, but basically we’re at the dawn of a new era. The first documented instance of smoking was about 5,000 BC; I think it’s been 7,000 years.

Benjamin A. Smith: Not vape, you’re talking about. [laughter]

Nima Noori:   Like, smoking, I’m talking about smoking. So this is the dawn of a new era; we’re talking about personal, thermodynamic systems, personal use thermodynamic systems that are used for delivery. So it has a host of different type of applications, and we’re at the very beginning.

There is different things that go into it, and calibration at this point in time is the name of the game. Features can be added, but not all of them are things that customers are asking for; but with time and with the technologies getting more advanced, it’s just like, I say, smartphones or laptops. The first iPhone that came out versus what it became.

Benjamin A. Smith: Okay, so you’re talking about more efficiencies, heating up faster, things like that…things that will actually improve it in a material way.

Nima Noori:   Things of that nature. One can look at vaporizers as a small thermodynamic system. So you have a heating element, you have, let’s say, a central processing unit, you have batteries and so on and so forth. And all of these things are constantly being improved. So the semiconductors you see on the cell phone front, whatever they do that determines how small they can get, how powerful they get, how much thinking they can do, how interconnected they get.

For example, one of the, let’s say, further out projects that we have already put parts of the infrastructure in place is the communication through the cyberspace, basically, and the, basically the taking of usage patterns and communicating back what the level, let’s say, of usage of the individual is and when they need to re-order.

Now, I know legislation is not ready for that yet, but those are things that are going to just revolutionize the industry, and it just requires time for the rest of the world to catch up.

Benjamin A. Smith: Right. Now, I’ve recently become aware of a vaporizer, I forget the brand, but one that can be activated with a smart phone, where you can actually heat it to a certain temperature and obviously get the, you know, the terpenes and different levels of THC or CBD that you want out of it. Do you have a product that does that, that you could activate from your smart phone? And if not, is one upcoming?

Nima Noori:   Yes, there is about three of them available now. But that’s a very, very good point you raise. Because the Arc deliberately is further upgradeable, but it doesn’t work with an app, because during the development process, we started asking – and this is information that we did publish before – we started asking, Who actually wants to do that? Because when you to want to vaporize, you want to vaporize, and you want to vape within seconds, basically.

Benjamin A. Smith: Yeah. You don’t want to play around with your phone, you want to vape.

Nima Noori:   Exactly. In fact, 21 percent, if I remember right, 21 percent of people actually cared, and of those 21 percent, you’ve got to think of the conversion rate; about 5 to 10 percent actually use it. The rest set it up and don’t use it for three months. So it’s very, it matters what you do with that feature, not just that it is in there.

Benjamin A. Smith: Okay, so you’ve actually focused group that aspect out and realized that people actually don’t really want it at this point, it’s a very low threshold of people, so it’s on the road map but it’s not a priority for you?

Nima Noori:   This goes a bit beyond a focus group, and because we had, for example, just TVapve.ca. That’s a Canadian website; I’m not talking about any of the other websites. We’re one of the major, one of the top opinion leaders in the sector globally. So, 6 million views in the last year, and I’m not talking legalization time; it just goes up from there, right? I’m talking the year before, 6 million views.

So what we do when we send out a survey, and this is published, this is on our blog, for example, and you can see how many surveys we sent out and how many respondents we have, I think that survey that I quoted had at least 750 respondents that took part in that survey. So it’s not just five people thinking that’s what you’re going to do with an app.

Benjamin A. Smith: Right. You have enough data there to make a conclusion.

Nima Noori:   Yes, Ben, yes.

Benjamin A. Smith: Okay. So what next for the company? How are sales going? Are you meeting your sales thresholds, and what comes up next in the next two or three quarters? I know you’re not a public company at this point; is, perhaps, going public on the road map as well?

Nima Noori:   So, I’m going to answer the first part of the question, that’s a loaded question on its own. On the road map, what happened at legalization month, that month, and before we were already the biggest in Canada, and one of the major players in the world, but, October we doubled.

Benjamin A. Smith: Doubled sales?

Nima Noori:   Doubled.

Benjamin A. Smith: In that month?

Nima Noori:   Yes. Yes. Month-over-month, we doubled, and the trend is very favourable continuously, so it’s not a peak and then a drop-off or anything like that.

So with that, we believe that we have a big duty to the Canadian, basically, economy, as our politicians took quite a bit of risk to take Canada towards, let’s say, legalization. And the Western world is going to dominate after that. We think we have a great duty to make sure that Canada plays a big, let’s say, role in the vaporization segment on the innovation front.

So we do have innovations like the cartridge system that’s going to be disposable, and it’s going to be available in not too long of the future. We believe that that is the next, again. So when you talk about the future, not only are we connected already to most of the supply chains – so in the legal spectrum, we already have, let’s say, business interactions, POs and so on and so forth going up with at least 60 percent of the stores that are licensed. And I’m not counting all the head shops and stores and LPs that we had from before, right?

So we can literally play a big role in which way the segment goes, and we intend to do that. And we also are one of the major opinion leaders, so –

Benjamin A. Smith: So you’re active on the policy front? Do you have a window with the government, do you have a liaison, if you want to call it that?

Nima Noori:   We do always get our opinions to them, but we don’t do so out of the, let’s say, outside of the channels that they intend to. So everybody can do that; we do it as well, right? We do it as a company, maybe they care more. We know that they basically, read our stuff, but I wouldn’t say that we have power to influence those things beyond, let’s say, what any other institution would have.

That being said, when it comes to that – so there’s cartridge technology, and on the oil front, I didn’t bring the portfolio here for display today, because the GT is already launched and people know it; there’s thousands and thousands of units out already, and we just launched in November, you know. And this is a premium unit. Reviews compare, reviews called it, like, it’s something out of the Porsche design portfolio.

And Forbes called it, quote unquote, badass. I think you gotta bleep me there out. But basically, we have on the oil front as well, we have the most comprehensive portfolio that will, meetings and so on and so forth, there’s more than a couple dozen scheduled, will launch mid-next month. So we’ll be doing, we’ll be a big player on the hardware front just like we have been in the past.

Benjamin A. Smith: Okay. And lastly, cannabis, of course, for export is restricted in most countries around the world. Is it the same thing for vaporizers? Obviously it’s a different category; do you have any restrictions with, you know, importing your product in other EU countries, for example?

Nima Noori:   Luckily, no. We do have an office and a subsidiary in Germany that we’re capturing Europe with; they’re doing amazing in very short order. So we don’t have that. So that’s why, when you look at LPs, and we say we have this brand and that brand, and you may look at it, and at the current state it may be 3D renders of a packaging and so on and so forth; when we talk about our portfolio, our top two brands play in the Top 5 brands of vaporizers in Canada, and we’re talking about 300, approximately 300,000 skus circulating in Canada right now.

So basically, we can enter every market much sooner than any cannabis player can because we’re much more broader set up like that. So we are already expanding globally.

Benjamin A. Smith: And you’re cash flow positive as a company, of course.

Nima Noori:   Yes. We’re very profitable, and I say that talking about with that we are successful because we also are very profitable for our supply chain partners. They also make good money, and I’m sure they love us as much as we love them.

Benjamin A. Smith: That’s great. Now last question – I know the previous last question was supposed to be the last question, but, do you plan on going public anytime soon? I don’t think you addressed that.

Nima Noori:   No, I didn’t. I’ve been pitched more than a couple dozen times by many, many, many different people. I don’t believe it is necessary for us to go public because we don’t need funds on that scale. We are very profitable, things are progressing, though in the private spectrum, we are open to strategic partners that would want to invest, because we do double rather quickly. And in order to keep that up more effectively and be able to capture the globe, we’re open to that.

And of course, I think one of your guests was AltaCorp, one of the best investment bankers I know, that do represent us on that front. And of course, if there is opportunities with people that have strategic depth, we do look at that. But public at this point in time, I don’t think it is necessary to do that. We’re much more agile being private.

Benjamin A. Smith: Great. That’s a great update, Nima. Thank you for joining us on the program, we appreciate it. We’ll be following your story.

Nima Noori:   Thank you very much, Ben. It was a pleasure.

Benjamin A. Smith: Great.

Original article: TVape Produces Canada’s Leading Vaporizer Brands

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