MILLIONA IRE QUITTERS
How kicking 40-a-day smoking habits led two Scots brothers to create one of the country’s fastestgrowing firms (worth £100m) – with lavish lifestyles to match
WHEN Callum Henderson started smoking as an 11-yearold schoolboy, it looked like the silliest decision of his young life. Soon, he was hopelessly hooked on Marlboro Golds, spending a small fortune on a 40-a-day habit and, as he once admitted, ‘coughing my guts up every morning’.
Within a few years his younger brother Connor took up the evil weed, too, and the pair hurtled towards adulthood as inveterate nicotine addicts, reducing their life expectancy with every puff.
Today the brothers are aged 32 and 29 and still have not kicked their nicotine addiction. Yet the outlook could hardly be more positive.
They are the practically anonymous siblings at the head of the fastest growing business in Scotland, reaping extraordinary rewards.
Home for the elder brother, for example, is one of Edinburgh’s most desirable properties, a £2.5million, six-bedroom mansion complete with cinema and indoor swimming pool.
His younger brother, meanwhile, has just moved into a turreted, seven-bedroom mid-Victorian pile near Linlithgow, West Lothian, which was once owned by the family behind the whisky liqueur Drambuie.
Ironically, it is unlikely that any of this largesse would have come their way without their respective addictions.
The brothers jointly run Vaporized, which was named last month as the highest placed Scottish firm in the Sunday Times Virgin Atlantic Top 100, ranking UK companies by sales growth.
Starting as a single-shop vaping business in Edinburgh’s Leith in 2012, it has achieved average annual growth of almost 100 per cent in the past three years and become a veritable empire.
There are now 114 Vaporized shops across Britain, from Penzance to Inverness. Sales reached £22.7million last year and some believe the company may now be worth as much as £100million.
All this has catapulted the brothers into a financial league they could scarcely have dreamed of reaching when they were growing up in a modest house overlooking a main road in the town of Galashiels, Selkirkshire.
And, into the bargain, the siblings get to tell themselves they are in the business of saving lives: every convert from cigarettes to their ‘95 per cent safer’ product represents the possibility of an early death averted, they believe.
mY mission is to spread the benefits of vaping and ultimately save lives,’ declared Connor Henderson in one early interview. ‘Because that’s what vaping does. It saves lives.’
But despite the meteoric rise of the business, the two portly brothers behind it have virtually no public profile, preferring to leave the talking to one of their senior directors.
‘They tend not to do that,’ says Doug Mutter, when asked if the brothers would agree to an interview. ‘That’s one of my roles in the company.’
It was in late 2011 that a friend in a pub suggested to Callum Henderson that he should try what was then an early e-cigarette product.
Before long, both siblings were vaping regularly and, within a few weeks, they were ex-smokers getting their nicotine hit from a product which contained none of the killer ingredients of cigarettes.
The two young businessmen were already making some money in a variety of entrepreneurial projects, from buying and selling real estate to used cars. But now they realised they were staring at a business opportunity of a different order entirely.
Senior director Mr Mutter takes up the story: ‘They very early saw a gap in the market. It was a product that helped the two owners come off cigarettes but they were always difficult to find and were based solely online.
‘They had the idea that there were so many others out there that would be looking for products to help them make the switch that they set up a store in Leith to take that on.’
Six years later, the shops verge on ubiquity and, within them, an array of flavours vie for vapers’ attention.
In Scotland there are both Celtic and Rangers themed e-liquids available, with products such as Emerald Green Apple and Watermelon Winger catering for the Parkhead side and Strawbarry Ferguson and Tobacco the Net geared towards Ibrox.
Other e-liquids selling at £17 a time include Don’t Care Bear, Farley’s Gnarly Sauce and Ugly Butter.
The idea, says Mr Mutter, is customers experiment with flavours while reducing the nicotine content in the e-liquids they use with their vaping kits – which can also be bought from Vaporized for around £20 upwards.
Many will quit altogether but, from a business point of view, the clear preference is for them to remain low-level addicts like Vaporized’s sibling bosses.
Certainly, their continued dependence on nicotine seems to lose the pair not a moment of sleep as they gorge on the fruits of their newfound wealth.
Since starting the business the brothers have moved from Edinburgh tenement properties to seven-figure houses.
Both enjoy long term relationships with glamorous women from overseas – Callum with 31-year-old Liliana Recinos from El Savador and Connor with Icelander Hrafnhildur Matthiasdottir – and both now have young families growing up in considerable style.
Birthdays for the youngsters are a whirl of pool parties, bouncy castles and hired performers at the older brother’s art deco home in Edinburgh’s Fairmilehead.
The property has electric gates, a twostorey garage and enormous garden with an indoor swimming pool at the far end, reached by a long corridor snaking from the main house. While neither brother has a social media profile, both of their partners do – and provide regular updates for friends and followers on developments in their lavish lifestyles. There was the new diamond-encrusted Rolex watch on Miss Recinos’s profile, for example, and the holiday last Christmas in the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, Connor, his girlfriend and their two young daughters recently moved out of a futuristic, new-build house in Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart. A neighbour said: ‘It was very odd. One day I came home and the house was empty – nothing and no one there. I would see him occasionally but I couldn’t say I knew him. He wasn’t really a part of the community or very involved.
HE left without telling any neighbours, as far as I know. I read about his business doing very well though, so maybe he just decided to up sticks and moved away.’
He did – to a fabulous mansion dating from 1858 two miles south of Linlithgow. It was the home of Georgina MacKinnon, once the chairman of the Drambuie company and, for a time, the only person who knew the secret recipe for the liqueur. She died in 1973 but speculation persists that the recipe remains hidden somewhere within the house.
Not that Mr Henderson will be concerned about finding it. Thanks to vaping he and his family now live in baronial splendour. There is an oak-framed conservatory, enormous kitchen with underfloor heating, polished granite tiling and an Aga, as well as an array of public rooms, including a reception hall, morning room and sun room. Outside, the gardens stretch to nearly two acres.
Mr Mutter says both brothers remain ‘heavily involved’ in the dayto-day running of the company, but stay firmly in the background so far as publicity is concerned.
How, then, did the siblings get it so right, becoming in only a few years the largest bricks and mortar outlet for vaping products in the UK?
‘The rapid expansion is down to consumer demand and the greater awareness of the public health potential and the benefits to adult smokers of switching from cigarettes to vaping,’ says Mr Mutter.
According to Cancer Research UK figures from this year, 9.4million people in the UK still smoke cigarettes.
The number of vapers is estimated at three million and climbing, with at least half of those having come off cigarettes completely. That leaves a huge market still to aim for – and thousands of success stories with which to entice them.
Mr Mutter says: ‘The company’s plan is 300 stores in the UK by 2021 but we will also look and are looking into other European countries where there is a high smoking population, such as Germany, Italy and Spain, and try and replicate the success of the UK model in these countries.’
The model which has led to Vaporized outlets springing up on high streets the length and breadth of the country is a franchise operation in which prospective store managers are encouraged to rent retail units and sell the company’s products.
Staff will be trained in assessing customers’ vaping requirements, signage and branding will be delivered and the store can be up and running within a matter of weeks.
Mr Mutter makes no apologies for the brand name’s growing ubiquity in shopping thoroughfares.
‘The battle is with cigarettes and how readily available packets of cigarettes are,’ he says. ‘The target is to ensure the availability of vaping products is there so people don’t have that urge to buy cigarettes.’
rARELY in business do the purposes of commercial sense and altruism combine as conveniently as this. Yet the results of practically every scientific study of vaping allows them to do it.
It is not only vaping firms who say their alternative is at least 95 per cent safer than smoking. The UK Government body Public Health England says so, too.
Professor John Newton, director for health improvement at PHE, said in February: ‘Every minute someone is admitted to hospital from smoking, with around 79,000 deaths a year in England alone.
‘Our review reinforces the finding that vaping is a fraction of the risk of smoking – at least 95 per cent less harmful – and of negligible risk to bystanders. Yet over half of smokers either falsely believe vaping is as harmful as smoking or don’t know.’
He added: ‘It would be tragic if thousands of smokers who could quit with the help of an e-cigarette are being put off due to false fears about their safety.’
Music to the ears, surely, for two Scottish brothers legitimately getting rich as life savers.
If there is a gripe from the medical profession, perhaps, it is that it would prefer that people neither smoked nor vaped.
There seems little urgency on the part of Vaporized to wean people off nicotine altogether. Indeed, seven years on, the brothers Henderson remain committed vapers.
‘It goes back to the actual product they are consuming,’ says Mr Mutter. ‘People don’t understand what nicotine in isolation is. It isn’t linked to any of the cancer-causing ingredients in cigarettes.’
Nicotine is lower on the risk scale than caffeine, he says.
So vaping goes on, the millions roll in and the Vaporized headquarters has gone from a tiny store in Leith to a vast unit in Edinburgh’s Newbridge Industrial Estate, with an array of BMWs and Audis parked outside.
Neither brother was willing to break cover when the Mail visited. They are one of the nation’s most remarkable success stories, but shrouded in a fog of their own making. Additional reporting by Annie Butterworth.