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When this industry was young, it was different.

Many of us who opened vape shops, manufactured products, or stepped into advocacy were former smokers who had found something that helped us leave combustible cigarettes behind. We wanted to share that success with others, and our focus was harm reduction.

Our early vape shops were not simply retail stores. They were places where we sat down with smokers frustrated or exhausted from failed attempts to quit. We helped them find products suited to their needs, adjusted nicotine levels, explained devices, changed coils, repaired equipment where we could, and answered countless questions as they moved away from combustible tobacco and onto what we firmly believed to be life-saving technology.

When a patron gave up smoking, we celebrated with them. Some shops created certificates. Others taped surrendered cigarette packs to walls or collected them in bins.

Our customers became friends. We knew their stories — stories that touched us deeply.

That culture of harm reduction, education, and personal connection helped create the independent vapor industry we built together — and the industry SFATA was created to protect.

Over time, everything changed.

Technology advanced from the early eGo batteries and 510 cartomizers many of us started with to sub-ohm devices and ultimately to the single-use products now found almost everywhere.

As vaping became more widespread, the public and regulatory landscape changed with it. Although SFATA originally led the charge to raise the legal vaping age to 21 through its “Age to Vape” program, youth use dramatically altered the conversation.

Federal and state regulation became more restrictive. Compliance became more burdensome and expensive. Flavor bans, taxes, shipping restrictions, product-registration laws, licensing requirements, and enforcement uncertainty transformed the marketplace.

As a maturing industry, we attempted to comply.

I personally worked with the PMTA Share Group while SFATA did everything it could to help small businesses navigate the regulatory process. Independent manufacturers spent enormous amounts of time, money, and effort filing PMTAs, hoping they would be given a fighting chance.

Instead, that hope gave way to marketing denial orders, warning letters, penalties, and the steady disappearance of businesses that had tried so hard to comply.

Manufacturers disappeared.

Distributors and retailers followed.

Thousands of traditional vapor shops shut their doors.

At the same time, the retail model changed. The traditional vape shop built around service, education, and helping smokers transition away from combustible tobacco became increasingly overshadowed by a broader smoke-and-vape marketplace where that original harm-reduction focus was often less central.

The industry may still be large in terms of product sales, but the community that built the independent vapor movement has significantly shrunk.

Still, SFATA kept fighting, steadfastly carrying out its mission.

We educated and challenged regulators and legislators, worked with state organizations, fought bills that threatened the industry, hosted educational webinars, shared critical updates, and did our best to guide members through some of the most tumultuous years our industry experienced.

And we did it with fewer people, fewer resources, and fewer dollars every year.

The hardest truth is this: SFATA did not simply lose members. The industry lost the businesses that made up our membership.

As those businesses disappeared, so too did the financial foundation that allowed SFATA to continue its work.

For the last several years, we cut expenses, became entirely volunteer-run, and stretched every remaining dollar as far as we could. We kept hoping that if we held on a little longer, the landscape might change or the support needed to sustain SFATA might return.

It didn’t.

There was simply no sustainable path forward.

Sadly, SFATA is not the only longtime voice this community has lost.

CASAA’s decision to end active advocacy was already a profound blow to the consumer harm-reduction movement. For years, CASAA ensured consumers had a place in the fight and a voice in policy discussions that directly affected them. Now, the independent-business community is losing SFATA.

What is being lost is more than another name at the advocacy table. SFATA represented something increasingly rare. As the first established trade organization representing the independent vaping industry, we never accepted funding from Big Tobacco and remained free of Chinese influence. Our volunteer Board was elected from among our own members — all independent business owners living the same regulatory, financial, and political realities as the businesses we represented.

Every person sitting at that table had skin in the game.

Our advocacy was shaped by the people living with the consequences. That mattered.

With SFATA’s closure, the industry is losing not only a national voice for independent businesses, but a decade and a half of institutional knowledge, trusted relationships, hard-earned experience, and an organization whose direction came from the very businesses it served.

We know what has been lost — and what will be lost — because we were there when it was built.

 

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We remember the first shops and the first legislative battles.

We remember walking into statehouses, congressional offices, regulatory meetings, and hearing rooms where policymakers had never seen a vapor product before, trying to explain not only what this industry was, but why it mattered.

We remember Hill Days, when advocates and business owners came together in Washington to carry that message directly to lawmakers.

We remember annual meetings that brought stakeholders together from across the country to share information, build relationships, strengthen strategy, and remind one another that none of us were fighting alone.

We remember state advocates sounding the alarm when bad bills were introduced, and chapter leaders, lobbyists, attorneys, business owners, consumers, and volunteers working together across state lines because we understood that a threat to one part of this industry could quickly become a threat to all of us.

We remember pooling money we could barely afford to give, the late-night calls, testimony written at midnight, flights taken on short notice, business owners who closed their shops to testify, victories no one thought we could pull off, and losses that stayed with us long after the votes were counted.

But most of all, we remember — and are grateful for — you.

SFATA was strengthened by every state organization that stood beside us, every advocate who picked up the phone, every expert who offered guidance, every member who answered a call to action, and every person who refused to let independent businesses and adult consumers be erased from the conversation.

None of us built this alone.

I am incredibly proud of what SFATA accomplished, proud of the fights we took on, and proud that for nearly fifteen years independent businesses had an organization willing to stand up and say they mattered.

SFATA was never just an association to me. It was a reflection of an industry we built together — ordinary people who became entrepreneurs because we believed adult smokers deserved another option, and who were willing to put our livelihoods, time, money, and reputations behind that belief.

And although SFATA’s chapter is coming to a close, the story of vapor is not.

Vapor is here to stay. What remains uncertain is the shape of the industry that survives — whether independent businesses and open-system products will still have a place, or whether the market will be dominated by large corporate interests.

Our belief in harm reduction has never wavered. What has changed is our ability, with the resources available to us, to meaningfully influence the battles ahead.

The fight will continue.

To everyone who stood with SFATA over the years: thank you.

It has been an honor to stand with you.

April L. Meyers
Board President & CEO
Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association