Vaping no flavour of month

It has its own lab to manufacture e-liquid itself.

- Antoinette Slabbert

When a former South Airways African pilot started vaping to quit smoking, he saw a business opportunity and started a store in this industry.

Today, Barry Buchman (57) is the CEO of Vaperite, which owns 34 vape stores nationwide as well as a central storage facility and a laboratory where the group develops and manufactures its own e-liquid in an astonishing variety of flavours.

The group hopes to have 40 stores by the end of the year and 50 a year later.

"I started smoking when I was 16 years old," says Buchman.

At 34, he stopped "cold turkey", but after a few years, the craving overcame him, and he was back to about 15 cigarettes a day.

He wanted to quit smoking, but in a sustainable way, and when vaping started taking off, it seemed like a solution.

He got a Twisp - the brand that dominated the market at the time - and never looked back.

Getting the business started

However, the equipment was inefficient and expensive at the time, with vaping still in its infancy in South Africa.

"When I flew, the liquid would leak in my suitcase and mess everything up!"

As an international airline pilot, he travelled the world and saw that better products were available in other countries. That's when his business brain started working.