The Vape Dilemma: Explanations And Solutions

Here at Silver Owl Headquarters, we’ve spent the past two months scrambling to figure out what we have to do to ensure our compliance with the PACT Act’s updated language. We’ve previously discussed the impact of this legislation- if you’re unfamiliar with the PACT Act, we’ve got a more thorough breakdown of it here – but we felt it was pertinent to shed some light on an issue we’ve been calling “The Vape Dilemma” around the office.

Let’s take a look at a few key components to this dilemma. Our vape products- Full Spectrum CBD and Full Spectrum Lite Cartridges, Delta 8 Cartridges and Delta 8 Disposables– have consistently been some of our most popular products and tend to work extremely well, especially when compared to other cartridges and disposable vapes on the market.

Though our ratio of properly functioning vapes to duds is extremely favorable (we’ve sent out a few hundred thousand units at this point and received about a dozen customer complaints to-date), we do get the occasional report of a defective unit. Any vape manufacturer can expect the occasional dud, but the new laws bottleneck all of our options for dealing with these issues.

So what are we going to do about this? The same thing we’ve always done: provide the best support to our products’ users and our partners in retail that we can. Let’s get into the issues and discuss our solutions!

Issue 1: Our Vapes Are Great

While this might not seem like a problem at all, it most certainly is in this context. Silver Owl Vapes remain some of our most popular products, and for good reasons: they provide effects quicker than most other methods of delivery, the flavors they produce are phenomenal and, as mentioned earlier, they tend to work extremely well much more often than they don’t work at all. When compared to the popularity of our other products, our CBD Cartridges and Delta 8 Vapes are in a completely different bracket.

Issue 2: We Can’t Provide Them

Under the PACT Act’s modified policies, we can no longer directly offer any kind of Electronic Nicotine Delivery System (“ENDS”) to consumers. The language was deliberately left vague enough to effectively ban any kind of vape product, including those used to vaporize hemp derived cannabinoids, along with the disposable nicotine vapes specifically targeted by the legislation.

We’re willing to comply with these changes, hence the lack of vape products currently available on our website. However, this issue leads to another problem:

Issue 3: We Can’t Offer Replacements

There’s no room for “creative interpretations” here- if you’re an end user and not a business entity registered to receive vape products, we can’t ship anything to you. This includes replacement vapes for defective units. The penalties for getting caught doing so anyways are far too steep to ignore.

Before the rules changed, we were happily handling all exchanges for everyone across the country. It didn’t matter if you bought it from our website or a store that carries our brand, either by buying from us or our partners in distribution in practically every state in the Continental United States: if you bought a defective vape, we’d mail you replacements in a heartbeat. Our partners in retail would even direct their customers to us because they knew we’d handle exchanges for manufacturer’s defects.

This was simply our standard operating procedure for exchanges, but we can’t continue operating in such manners. However, we do have a solution arranged!

The Fix: In-Store Exchanges

If we couldn’t personally exchange a defective vape with a functional unit, but still wanted to be able to provide this service, there was only one solution: work with the retail shops that carry Silver Owl products to provide in-store exchanges.

With our newest update to our Return Policies, we’ll provide further clarification on our policies. If you’re selling our products, it’s worth mentioning immediately that you will not be financially responsible for exchanged goods- and neither will your customers. As manufacturers, we believe that’s our burden to bear.

Those costs will be ours; all we’re asking in return is that you offer this service. We’re working on a multimedia campaign to help spread the word about these new policies to shops and distributors across the country. If you work in retail or wholesale, you might be getting a letter from us soon!

The Mechanics

Here’s how these in-store exchanges will work from a few different perspectives:

As an end user- Let’s say you’ve bought a Silver Owl Delta 8 Cartridge, gotten home, put it on a 510 battery and discovered that it just won’t fire. If you can bring the defective vape, its original packaging and a receipt showing proof of purchase back to the CBD store or vape shop you got it from within 72 hours of its purchase, they’ll be able to exchange it for an identical unit that functions.

As a store owner or salesperson- if a customer returns with a faulty unit, its packaging and a receipt from your store within 72 hours, please provide an exchange with an identical unit (same Silver Owl product and flavor). If you’ll then collect these components and bring them to your local distributor on your next shopping trip (or reach out to us if you’re working with us directly), they’ll be able to exchange these with identical units at no additional charge.

As a distributor- if a retail client of yours returns with defective Silver Owl vape products, please provide exchanges with identical units at no additional charge and reach out to us with documentation of the products that came back defective. We’ll happily send replacement units to your distribution centers with your next order at no additional charge.

The Benefits

We feel like this is an excellent solution to a contemporary set of issues and we hope you’ll agree. None of our vape products’ users will ever have to worry about what will happen if they buy a dud from their favorite shops; none of the shops or distributors that carry our brand will have to worry about how to handle a return or whether they’ll be able to keep a loyal customer; and nobody outside of the Silver Owl CBD Company will ever have to worry about footing the bill for a defective CBD or Delta 8 vape that came from our manufacturing lines.

We’re genuine in our desires: we want to help people live happier, healthier lives; to help create a better way of doing business and usher in a new form of capitalism that sees profits gained through helping others – not at their expense, as so many capitalist entities tend to do.

We’re all about growing (we wouldn’t have built a legitimate business around our humble beginnings in our kitchens if we weren’t!), but we want to do it the right way and refuse to cut corners along the way. We want to see everyone in our lives- our families and friends, our fans, our business partners and their customers, and all of our neighbors- prospering and thriving. 2020 was hard enough on all of us… everyone could really use a break right now. If we all work together, we can all get that break and notch some wins on our belts!