Miniciggy has been trading since 2006. That makes us one of the longest-running e-cigarette retailers in the UK — and almost certainly the longest-running one that still makes the same kind of product it started with.

We thought it was worth taking a moment to explain why.

How Miniciggy started

In 2006, we weren't an e-cigarette company. We were people who smoked, who didn't want to keep smoking, and who hadn't found anything that helped us stop. Nicotine gum did nothing for us. Cold turkey felt impossible. And cigarettes were getting more expensive every year, on top of being something we knew we shouldn't be doing.

While sourcing other electronic products, we came across a device we'd never seen before: a battery-powered tube with a pre-filled cartridge that produced vapour you could inhale. We tried it. It was the first thing we'd encountered that actually felt like smoking. Familiar in the hand. Familiar to draw on. Satisfying in a way nothing else had been.

We thought other people might want to try it too. So we started selling them.

We were one of the first companies in the UK to do so. Another company was active around the same time (No longer exists sadly) — we genuinely can't say which of us was first, and it was over so quickly nobody was really keeping score. The point is we were there at the very start of e-cigarettes in this country, and we've been here every year since.

The three-part problem, and the cartomiser

The first generation of e-cigarettes was complicated and unreliable. They came in three separate parts: a rechargeable battery, a small refill cartridge full of liquid, and an atomiser that did the actual work of turning that liquid into vapour. The user had to assemble them, and when something stopped working, it was rarely obvious which of the three parts was the problem. Was the battery flat? Was the atomiser worn out? Was the cartridge empty? In practice, customers were never quite sure.

We weren't happy with that. So we started working on combining the cartridge and the atomiser into a single sealed unit. We were one of the first companies in the UK to introduce this — what became known as the "cartomiser". The whole device went from three parts to two: a battery, and a cartomiser that contained both the e-liquid and a fresh atomiser every time.

That change made e-cigarettes dramatically more reliable. Every time a customer attached a new cartomiser, they were getting fresh liquid and a brand new atomiser, all in one piece. No spare parts. No guesswork about which bit had failed. Twenty years on, that's still how a Miniciggy works. Two parts. Battery, cartomiser. Done.

What we decided not to do

The vape industry didn't stay where it was. Within a few years of cigalikes appearing, the market started moving in a direction we deliberately chose not to follow.

First came the open systems — refillable tanks that customers filled themselves with bottled e-liquid. Then came mods: bigger devices with adjustable wattage, replaceable coils, custom airflow, multiple settings. Then came the explosion of flavours: bubblegum, cotton candy, blue raspberry, unicorn milk, strawberry milkshake. Then disposables. Each wave was bigger than the last, and each one moved the product further from anything resembling a cigarette.

We watched all of it. We considered it. And every time, we decided not to follow.

The reason was simple. The smokers we'd built the business for didn't want any of those things. They wanted something that worked like a cigarette, looked like a cigarette, and didn't ask them to learn anything new. Big devices with menus and settings weren't going to help them. Bottles of liquid weren't going to help them. Bubblegum-flavoured vapour definitely wasn't going to help them.

And there was a second reason, harder to ignore the longer it went on: those products weren't really being made for adult smokers. The bright colours, the sweet flavours, the disposables in pastel finishes — those weren't designed with us in mind. They were designed to appeal to a market that included people who'd never smoked. Often very young people who'd never smoked.

We've always thought governments would step in eventually. They've been frustratingly slow about it. The disposable ban in June 2025 was a long-overdue start. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, when it passes, will tighten things further. Better late than never. But we never wanted to be a company waiting for the regulator to tell us what was acceptable. We made our own decision, twenty years ago, about what kind of product we'd sell and who we'd sell it to.

We sell tobacco and menthol cartomisers. That's it. No bubblegum. No candyfloss. No cocktail flavours. No bright colours. No flashy disposables. No mods. No tanks. No bottles of liquid. We make a product for adult smokers, and we make it look and behave like one.

The lifetime battery replacement guarantee

Around 2014 or 2015, we noticed something in our returns. Customers were sending back batteries they thought had failed. We'd test them, clean the contact points, and send them back working perfectly. The batteries weren't dying — they were just dirty.

We'd been telling customers for years how to keep their batteries clean. The advice clearly wasn't getting through, and we got tired of seeing perfectly good batteries returned because of a bit of debris on a contact point. Two small engineering changes also helped: we reduced the airflow holes in the thread from two to one, which made the batteries less prone to clogging, and we added a spring behind the central contact point so it kept proper contact with the cartomiser over time rather than getting compressed flat.

But cleaning advice clearly wasn't enough. So we made a different decision. If you're a regular Miniciggy customer and your battery starts to underperform — for whatever reason, no matter how long you've had it — send it back and we'll replace it free of charge. No quibbles, no warranty period, no end date.

As far as we're aware, no other UK e-cigarette retailer offers this. We've been doing it for around a decade and we're not changing it.

It's there because we'd rather have you as a long-term Miniciggy customer than lose you over a battery. It's also there because we trust the product. If we didn't, we couldn't afford to make this offer.

Twenty years, thousands of customers

We have thousands of customers on the books, and many of them have been buying from us for over a decade. Some placed their first Miniciggy order in the late 2000s and are still ordering today. They've been with us through every regulatory change, every industry trend, every wave of new products that came and went. They're the reason the company exists, and they're the reason we've never felt the need to be anything other than what we are.

The adult of electronic cigarettes

If you've read this far, you've probably worked out the kind of company we are. We're not flashy. We're not fashionable. We don't run influencer campaigns or release limited editions. We don't put bright colours on our packaging. We don't make products that look like markers, sweets, or USB sticks. We make a product that looks like a cigarette, for people who used to smoke cigarettes.

That's a deliberately narrow proposition, and that's the point. We've called it being the adult of electronic cigarettes, and that's how we think about it. Serious. Considered. No nonsense. No marketing tricks. Designed for grown-ups who know what they want.

The vape industry has spent twenty years getting bigger, brighter, sweeter and more complicated. We've spent twenty years staying the same. We think there are a lot of adult smokers in this country who actually want that.

If you're one of them, you're in the right place. We've been making this product for almost as long as it's been possible to make it, and we have no plans to stop.