Part 2 of 3: The Battle. The Year E-XHALE Almost Did Not Make It
This is Part 2 of the E-XHALE story.
By early 2021, the model was holding. Not comfortably, but it was holding. Stock was moving. A handful of stores had taken the product on. A third order was already in the planning.
Then the factory called.
The Ultimatum
The terms had changed without warning. The minimum order had tripled overnight. There was no negotiation on the table, no transition period, no room to manoeuvre.
It was simply beyond what the business could afford.
The only move left was to cut the range. Five flavours became three. Tobacco and Menthol were discontinued. Lush Ice, Ice Cola, and Banana Ice remained, chosen not for their popularity but for what the budget could realistically sustain.
From the outside, it read as a routine range adjustment. In reality, it was the brand pared back to its bare minimum, holding its position by the narrowest of margins.
The work continued.
A New Competitor Enters
Around the one year mark, the market shifted. A competitor arrived, better funded, better resourced, and faster to scale. Within weeks, the entire conversation around the category had moved. The market now had a clear alternative.
A visit to a SPAR in Walmer, Port Elizabeth, made the shift impossible to ignore. On the floor, customers and staff were already describing E-XHALE as the older option, and the newcomer as the brand to reach for.
It was a sobering thing to witness firsthand, watching a product built from the ground up be quietly written off in real time. But there was something clarifying in it too. The market had just delivered, free of charge, the most honest feedback a young brand could receive.
So the response was not to defend the old product. It was to go back to the drawing board.
Building Something That Could Not Be Easily Copied
The original factory could no longer deliver what the business needed. In October 2021, E-XHALE moved to a new manufacturer with a single objective: to compete on its own terms.Done properly, that meant investing in custom product moulds and hardware engineered specifically for E-XHALE, something a new entrant could not simply replicate. It cost more and it took longer, but it was the only path with a real future in it.
The outcome was the E-XHALE 900, developed from the original 400 puff device and rebuilt from the ground up. The packaging evolved alongside it, with design handed for the first time to local South African freelancers. The E-XHALE 2000, the 2K, became the first product to carry that elevated identity.
This was the turning point where a product became a brand.
The Dining Room Table
The operation, at that stage, still ran from a dining room table. There was an administrator now, and a sales team beginning to take shape, but the founder had become the single biggest bottleneck in his own business.
The solution was a modest room inside a larger office on Main Road in Walmer, five metres by five metres. With the business under a year old, no provider would grant a WiFi contract, so the room was chosen for the simplest of reasons: it came with WiFi already included.
A small team moved in. The product was stronger. The brand was sharper. And the competitor that had arrived better and faster had, unintentionally, done E-XHALE a lasting favour. It forced a standard that a comfortable market position never would have demanded.
In Part 3: From a 5x5 office on Main Road to six years, 6,500 retail partners, and five million products delivered across Southern Africa and beyond.