Vape Expo Review (May 2023)
As you may or may not be aware, me and Lizzie recently exhibited at the Vaper Expo in May 2023. Thought I’d throw a few things out there about how it is as an exhibitor, what we learnt, what went right and what went wrong!
We’ve had a couple of weeks now to digest Vaper Expo 2023 at the NEC, Birmingham and reflect on a manic 4 days that I won’t be forgetting in a hurry.
I’ll start with Thursday 11th May, the day we had to head over to build the stand in preparation for the B2B day on the Friday. Made what is usually a shortish drive to the NEC that took nearly 3 hours due to traffic, met Stu and Liz from Vapesmarter and made our way into the lorry park to unload. Upon walking into Hall 17 where the Ohm Zone was located, it was like feeding time at the zoo! Hundreds of people running around, fork lift trucks flying about, power tools, cables everywhere, dust, it was chaos as everyone worked at warp speed trying to be ready on time.
We all picked our way through the chaos and wheeled our loaded trolley over to the Ohm Zone which… well… wasn’t there!
As we arrived they had just started putting up the basic structures so we waited… and we waited… and we waited. After a couple of hours we had two and a half walls up so that was enough for us, time to build the stands. Roll on Friday.
Friday 12th May.
You’re not allowed to leave stock at the Vaper Expo overnight unless you have a lockable cabinet, we didn’t so first job in the Friday once arrived at NEC was to wheel all the E-Liquids in (We took around 500 bottles) and the tester mods, tanks and other assorted bits. Friday at Vaper Expo is a Business to Business day meaning that the vast majority of people attending are business owners or representatives, we anticipated a quiet day. 
Surprisingly though, it was steady, I wasn’t run off my feet but we had a good number of visitors trying our E-Liquids out and a couple of stores grabbed some smaller quantities to try out and a couple of other websites grabbed some larger amounts to offer to their customers, brilliant!
Overall Friday was a good introduction to Expo for us… Saturday was to come…
Saturday 13th May
Morning started like the last two, load the car and drive down the M1, along the A42 and into the NEC. This was the first day that was open to everyone and I’ll admit to being a tad nervous… what if no one came to our stand? What if no one liked our E-Liquid? What if someone clones a dinosaur and it eats us all? Usual stuff.
Wheeled all our stock back to our stand, this was already becoming annoying so next time, lockable cabinet will be coming with us. Unpacked, setup and ready to roll, tannoy announcement “Vaper Expo is now Open”.
It was immediate, a sea of people washing down through the halls, passing the numerous disposable stands on the main floor and heading for the Ohm Zone, ever seen the film 300? I felt like Gerard Butler just with less hair and fatter.
So it began, and it was amazing. I spoke with hundreds of different people on the day, received a lot of positive feedback and some constructive feedback which I found incredibly useful. Plenty of people grabbed some bottles, including numerous people who grabbed many, many bottles! I hope they enjoy them. Never really got a second but the day flew by. Ohm Zone was constantly busy and had more than a few exhibitors from the main floor coming into the Ohm Zone for a look.
Particular praise was given to Amalfi Lemon, Roseus Custard, Britannia Custard, Hispania Blueberry and RY4 Calamellus which was great to hear!
About 5pm it started to ease up so I got chance to come off the stand and check out everyone else in the Ohm Zone, everyone looked shattered! They had all been as busy as us and had the opportunity to chat with people like Black Rose, Deathwish Mods, Infernal, Longboat who all seemed very happy (and tired) with how the day had gone.
Time to load everything back up (Arghhhh) and drive back home.
Sunday 14th May
Shorter day this time, everything closes down at 4pm. Sunday was far more relaxed than the Saturday, still plenty of people but a bit steadier. Only downside is the stage area goes nearly all day on Sundays so you can’t hear yourself think for most of it and ended up having to shout to people less than 3ft away! May take earplugs next time.
Very similar to Saturday in the end, lots of people, lots of laughs, lots of feedback. By 4pm though I was shattered, broken levels of tired, yet still had to take the stand down and load the car up! Everything gets abit fuzzy by that point. I’ll be eternally grateful to Kieron at Longboat for the bottle of water he kindly gave us. Note for next time, bring a pallet full of water.
That was that, Vaper Expo 2023 ended. Lizzie had to drive home this time as I just wanted to sleep.
So thoughts on Expo, it was overall great. Really good fun, lots of people chatting, very social and feel like we managed to introduce a good number of people to LegioX and let them see what we were all about.
Highlight for me though was meeting so many great people at so many smaller, UK Vaping companies in the Ohm Zone.
It didn’t all go perfect of course, navigating the mountains of things required by the NEC and things we needed caused months of headaches but we thankfully didn’t miss anything.
Would we do it again? Definitely. We are already looking ahead to Vaper Expo October and hoping we will be in attendance again.
