TPD DAY.
Or what's known as "The day that changed the UK vaping industry forever".
Call it what you may, but on the 20th of May 2016, the UK Government rolled out a huge list of changes which the vaping industry had to comply with. In this were a number of minor changes, and a selection of huge changes which affect us to this day.
WHAT WAS THE BIGGEST CHANGE?
This goes without saying. TPD was implemented to restrict the size of e-liquid bottles where nicotine was pre-mixed in. Pre-TPD it was fully legal to purchase any sized eliquid (most commonly it was 100ml), however it had nicotine pre-mixed in.
The new regulations required that if a container was to exist with nicotine already included, the maximum size permitted was now 10ml. At the time, this was amazing news for those who had invested heavily in 10ml filling machines, as their production line was about to get ramped up exponentially.
100ml bottles lay dormant in warehouses, with no use aside from 0mg e-liquids - but why would anyone buy that? We had become so accustomed to the immediate cessation of pre-nic'd liquid that we'd become lazy, and most of us switched immediately to 'multipacks' - these were mainly 3x10ml boxes and provided 30ml of e-liquid in one handy box.
I dread to think how many bottles of pre-nic'd eliquid were destroyed after this date.
Moving forward, news was spreading about a new way to enjoy larger bottle sizes, but keeping within the new rules - a term was coined.. "shortfills"
The name speaks for itself - a bottle which had been 'short filled' ie - it wasn't full to the top.
You would purchase your shortfill, and then add the relevent amount of 'nic shots' to make up your desired nicotine strength. A lot of companies failed to get on this new hype fast enough, and 3x10ml multipacks soon became completely obsolete. A few companies actually ceased to trade after this, as they had so much backlog of multipacks they could not afford to make the switch to the new style bottles.
The process was also slightly confusing at first - why does 2x 18mg shots make 3mg liquid? - This was something a lot of people had to learn and we now take this knowledge for granted.
10ml bottles soon became only used for MTL vapers, and nic shots - and very rarely is a 10ml bottle used for anything else.
Other countries don't have such restrictions - for instance in the middle east you're more than welcome to purchase 50ml of 50mg Salt nicotine - which they sub ohm!
America is much the same, however with the recent vaping scandal that's thankfully now calmed down.
Either way, we've all learned how to comply with new regulation, and we've all adapted our businesses to suit it, regardless of our opinions of it.
There was talk of a large update to TPD - forcing shortfills to become obsolete, pushing the ball back into the 'if it contains nicotine, it must be 10ml' but this never surfaced. Chinese whispers can be thought of as gospel if enough people hear it.