You know that feeling when you meet someone, maybe at a bar, maybe trading glances across a room full of flavored 7/11 e-cig smoke, and a certain electricity crackles between you, and you feel inexplicably as if you’ve known them all your life? That’s how I feel about this Wall Street Journal article about competitive vaping, also called, apparently, “cloud chasing.”
Tripp Mickle visits a vape shop in vape Texas where two vape men stand back-to-back with their vape guns drawn as the vape ref is all, “1! 2! 3! PULL!”—and the dimensions of their powerful vape clouds are taken by two vape judges with two vape sticks. He goes on:
Competitions like this have been heating up world-wide, spreading from Raleigh, N.C., to Los Angeles and Canada to Indonesia. This showdown is one of the smaller contests, but on the same day, there are three others taking place around Dallas at various vape shops, which specialize in sales of refillable e-cigarettes called vaporizers.
Competitions are straightforward. Cloud chasers inhale on the devices, which convert e-cigarette “juice” into vapor. They then toast the competition by blowing the biggest, densest vapor cloud possible. In less than two years, the sport has adopted all the trappings of professional athletics. It not only has fans but teams, sponsors and cash prizes.
“The industry is blowing up,” said Garry Rivera, the 32-year-old chief executive of Surefire Vapor and organizer of the inaugural World Series of Vape, which he is planning in Las Vegas in December. “We might as well take it to the next level.”
World. Series. Of. Vape.
According to the WSJ, the overall vape market is a cool $1.2 billion a year, and vape shops are both putting together competitive vaping teams and also paying out decent-size prizes for vape knows what reason—up to $2,000.
This is all really good stuff. Very tight. I’m trying to play it cool with this article but I’m in too deep already, so see you at the Vape Summit, basically, and may the most skilled vapesman (let’s not kid ourselves about this very specific demographic) win.
Image via Shutterstock