How Did Smax Come Up With Their Flavors?
We're super happy to be introducing a max VG brand for our cloud chasing friends. If you've been around since the good ole days of the vape industry you must have heard of this old school brand that came out with the first-ever airless pump bottle. Known for their elegant aesthetic and max VG line, Smax quickly became recognized as a premium e-liquid made for cloud chasers. Taken from their blog, check out below how each flavor came to life!
Good Vibes
There’s never enough to go around, so this one is for you guys and gals! Thanks for being the good people that you are and trusting in SMAX!
Sadly, we almost rejected this flavor because one of the extracts from the flavor houses changed and we just couldn’t get it to taste the same as the original recipe again. It was almost trashed for another brand we were working with at the time but I said, “Hey, hold up, NO! Smax needs it!” We adopted the unwanted forbidden fruit punch orphan and named her Good Vibes. It brought so many good feelings to me vaping it the first time and there was no way we could have kept this oldie but goodie from you.
This one is my personal favorite and believe it or not, it currently ranks as our 2nd top seller next to Pony On Acid.
Lick It
What kind of flavors would Smax have that would make us stand out from the rest? The first thing I did was drive to Target, and bought a huge bag of Jelly Bellies in an assortment of 49 flavors. These were NOT just any ordinary jelly beans, they were a nostalgic delicacy of my childhood. My dad used to buy them for us when they came in those fancy little gift boxes as a kid and I’ve never ate candy that tasted so accurate to their descriptions.
Peach wasn’t exactly my favorite but I ended up trashing all of our other attempts of the fruit flavors because they just sucked. We didn’t want to create flavors that everyone else was making, and it was too ambitious to do a juicy pear that didn’t taste like old lady perfume. I was hoping that by eating 49 different flavors excluding black licorice and buttered popcorn that we would find at least a few worthy profiles to recreate and improve.
Lick It was a super basic profile, but that’s when I realized that simplified recipes are sometimes the way to go. We added some cream to it and this was actually the flavor that got me back on nicotine. I remember receiving a Fedex shipping bill from China and it was nearly 9 thousand dollars, I almost fell to my chair realizing I chose the express option and it stressed me out so much that I started vaping nicotine that night. What does one do with peaches and cream? The only thing I could think of was LICK IT and apparently, NIC IT.
Mafia Princess
Priscilla was definitely not about the #vapelyfe but it turned into a mild obsession for me. I kept bugging her to try it but not without me because I’ll never forget how awful my first experience was. We were working on our last album together “Everything and Nothing” and I would just sit there and fog up my tiny room working on our tracks while I overdosed on euphoric sensations.
I told her that I was planning on making a juice line and she didn’t seem so interested. It was never brought up again but I really tried to get her attention so I decided that Smax’s first dessert flavor would be Tiramisu since it’s her favorite dessert. I checked the market to see if there were any decent coffee flavors and the only one I tried tasted like burnt coffee.
She didn’t discover that the flavor was created for her until months later. One day, she walked by a vape shop in Koreatown and spotted Smax through the window. Of course, she purchased a zero milligram pump bottle and saved her vape baptismal date for Halloween night at VapeCon in 2014. Always made with love for people that we love.
Pony On Acid
We kept this flavor the most elusive out of them all because we just didn’t know what to make of it. It was a mistake and a mystery but everything came together in the end.
Pony On Acid was the result of many failed attempts of our goal and we had no choice but to run with it after hearing all of the crowd’s shockingly positive response.
A friend of mine recommended this flavor by E-Liq Cube called “Pink Starburst”. I finally got my hands on a bottle from a local vape shop and immediately fall in LOVE . I wanted this flavor to be the inspiration for our first fruit flavor for the Smax Bible. At first, we tried to clone it but it was so wildly far off that we started remixing it and adding a bunch of unpredictable extracts and it just turned out to be this...this....magical medley of berries, pineapple, lime and cream.
Apart of me wishes that I could turn back time and rename this flavor considering how terribly inappropriate the name is for an adult product, but its too late now. I just couldn’t stop thinking of my last acid trip with Mary, Jessica and Ana in the summer of 2001 where all of life’s mysteries were answered through my trippy perceptions of reality. You would have to experience it for yourself to understand and oddly enough, it was the same way I felt about the birth of Pony On Acid, everything just made sense in the end.
Sammie Puffs
It was getting closer to our launch date, July 18th, 2014 and we were running out of time, only having 4 flavors ready to go.
Initially, the plan was to release 6 flavors for the Smax Bible. We had about 6 months to finalize these flavors and it was continuous testing, day in, day out. I was being too damn picky with revisions so we couldn’t get the 6th flavor done before the launch. With the majority of our flavors being fruity and having only one dessert flavor, we needed a second savory one. Something chocolatey, something light and fluffy and full of love.
I thought of Sami, my beautiful golden-skinned, mulatto friend from back home who I had given my last E-shish stick to. I don’t know if you guys remember those but they were fruit flavored shisha e-cig thingies with 300 puffs in them each. Those little guys were the staples of our summer in 2013. What in lord’s name made us think they were so cool? Sammie Puffs became our 5th flavor.
She's A Dime
There was a phase where we used to eat these really sweet cake pops from Starbucks with our coffee. We only bought them cause they were cute but they tasted kinda gross. I couldn’t get this baby photo out of my head of her scrunched up face after her dad stuck a lemon in her mouth for the shot. So there needed to be a Smax flavor that was a lemon/lime cake pop. Nobody had cake pop flavors at the time! But what is a cake pop anyway? There you have it. Plus, dime rhymes with lime and that she was!
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