Todd vs. Ameravape? Or is it Ameravape Vs the Vaping Community?

You couldn't be blamed for expecting that all of this nonsense would have died down by now. It hasn't. Why? You may ask, well you probably already know why, but just in case… it hasn't died down because the guys over at Ameravape don’t know when to keep their mouths shut!

Competition Mod? or well marketed pipe-bomb?

They need to stop posting to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
They need to take a step back from the drama and hope that the public forgets.
They need to re-invent themselves, and quietly release a new, high quality, reliable product.
They need to step delicately while slowly rebuilding a positive public image…

Right now, what they are doing bears more resemblance to moshing in a minefield than stepping delicately.

So let’s pretend that you've been hiding under a rock for the last several months, or that you need a refresher coarse because there might be a quiz on the subject tomorrow.

It all started when the Manhattan mod blew up in Ameravapes face. And by that I mean that a respected reviewer, Todd, didn't give them a favorable review. He questioned the venting capabilities of the Manhatten and compared it to a ‘pipe bomb’

But that was just the trigger.

The actual explosive event occurred when Ameravape responded… and not nicely… not nicely at all. Forget, for a moment, who’s right and who’s wrong about the Manhattan, forget about its venting. When someone threatens a well respected reviewer over an unfavorable review, the public sees it as an attempt to silence any criticism. This doesn't go over all that well.

*Boom! Right there Ameravape detonated a big poop filled fragmentation bomb all over themselves, because their little exchange with Todd was in writing… and was made public.

At the same time Ameravape was facing another problems... and preparing to react badly to it. You might say that they had another fuse burning on another public relations pipe bomb.

You see, Ameravape had arranged for a machinist to produce their Manhattan mod at the cost of $100k including materials. They paid $30k upfront, but when it came time to settle up, they only paid an additional $20k… leaving the machinist holding a bunch of unfinished mods and $50k in the hole. Now there are conflicting stories as to what exactly happened. One is that Ameravape just broke their contract and refused to pay for what they had ordered, the other is that half of what the machinist produced was defective and Ameravape declined to take delivery. Either way, what happened next is that the machinist decided to recoup his losses by finishing the Manhattans and selling them.

Ameravape responded by launching a campaign against cloned mods. Mind you, I don’t disagree with taking a stance against clones… in principle. But there are problems,,, One is, Ameravapes very public, petulant, comments. It was like watching a couple of pre-schoolers throw a temper tantrum on social media. And what with public opinion already turning against them over their treatment of Todd’s review… well… much mockery ensued.

And then someone pointed out some older review videos made by the Ameravape guys. Videos with them and their associates gleefully using and reviewing counterfeits of other companies’ mods and atomizers.

The mockery hit new levels of severity and ‘hypocrite’ was added to the list of words commonly used to describe Ameravape.

But like all good disasters, things just kept happening. This time it was the arrival of actual counterfeits/clones from China. Ameravape publicly stepped up their anti-clone dialog and even went so far as to cancel any future production of Manhattan mods and then make statements threatening legal action against Allibaba.com

While all of this was going on, while the vaping community was laughing at nearly every one of their public comments, Ameravape announced that they were in the process of moving to new offices and a new assembly shop and that they were starting work on a new mod… the Apollo. While these announcements did dispel the rumors that Ameravape was closing up shop over the Manhattan debacle they failed to do anything to address the negative public perception of either the company or it’s owners.

And that pretty much brings us to the present. At this point just about anything that Ameravape says or does is going to be met with ridicule, it doesn't help that their announcements and comments are rife with spelling and grammatical errors, but the real problem is that they keep saying anything at all.

There really doesn't seem to be much else for us to know, but we do need to decide how we, the vaping
community, will respond.

Even if the Manhattan, and soon the Apollo are the best mods available… a seriously questionable assertion in the first place, but even if they are… do we want to be supporting this company? A company whose owners have displayed childlike behavior and questionable character? A company that then calls into question the character of those that they do business with? A company that publicly states that there were quality issues with their manufacturing and still insists that their product is somehow the pinnacle of reliability? 

Personally, I have a litmus test of sorts for those that I do business with… If I couldn't sit down with someone and enjoy their company over a cup of coffee, and that means being able to tolerate them for the time it takes to actually enjoy a cup of coffee, not just the time it takes to guzzle one, if I couldn't do that, then I don’t want to do business with them.

So ask yourself, could you sit down with the guys from Ameravape for 30 minutes to an hour? Would you enjoy their company? Or would you be wanting to bang your head against something before it was over? Then ask yourself if you want to be supporting these guys or not.