Airgraft 2.0 just re-invented vaping with its groundbreaking device and membership program. Oh, and they cut the price in half too.
There’s a cliché that those of us who partake of the plant tend to be an easy-going bunch. We typically take experiences as they come; look at the positives; favor empathy over conflict. But this characterisation doesn’t take into account the passion that we feel (and often express) for cannabis: the cultivation, the culture and (when it comes to vaporisation) the cost.
And there’s a lot to be passionate about. In the years since legal liberalization, a ton of new players have entered the market, all with great-looking brands and promises of smaller, smarter, sexier, smoother experiences. And good on them. There are brands we love and brands we feel ‘meh’ about. But it’s been great to see the industry evolve into something that looks like the real, diverse legitimate market we were promised.
But is it great enough — or as great as we have a right to expect?
When you dig into the tech, it isn’t all rosy. Despite the variety of brands and device profiles out there, under the hood there’s actually a lot less variety than we might feel we have a right to expect.
Most vaporizers in fact use the same or similar tech to basic nicotine systems. They are manufactured at massive scale, usually in China — and are pretty unsophisticated. The heating element itself may have a couple of temperature settings. But it’s either on or off. Many take no account of the delicate balance of compounds in the extract, which in fact need to be heated at a range of different temperatures to be effectively released and absorbed.
What’s more, since the vaping scandal where a tiny minority of unscrupulous operators spoiled things for everyone (not to mention endangered lives), by marketing adulterated product, brands have been limited to creating ‘dumb’ devices. Locked out of the big tech platforms, including Apple and Google, much of the promise of early vaporizers in terms of data has been lost.
Enter Airgraft 2.0 — a new vaporizer system, coupled with a membership program which seeks to address these limitations across the board, with what the company promises is truly breakthrough technology.
You may remember Airgraft from their first Airgraft 1 product, which debuted in 2019. A pretty slick system in itself, Airgraft earned some nice reviews and an enthusiastic cohort of devotees. But the Airgraft team saw this first product as a step towards something even more innovative: a system that doesn’t just improve the experience and enhance flavor and feeling, but one that democratizes the vaping experience with a radical price-point too.
They looked at the pod first. Typical off-the-shelf tech heats the extracts crudely, burning some of the oil. This produces harmful by-products; it also means that up to 30% of the extract is trapped in the pod by the filters manufacturers have to mitigate the waste caused by a messy burn.
“Many vaporization devices available on the market today employ extremely simple technologies that just burn extracts, and the experience isn’t quite right for the user,” explains Mladen Barbaric, Airgraft founder and CEO. “Imagine using a stovetop that has only two temperature settings – off and high – to boil oil. At one point it will start boiling and then immediately start burning, thus changing the molecules. When the cannabis extract is overheated, the molecular structure of the oil is altered. You’re producing chemicals you didn’t mean to create, chemicals which consumers definitely shouldn’t be putting into their bodies.”
It’s here that the Airgraft teams background in medical tech came into play. They redesigned the pod from the ground-up using FDA recognized heated-food safe materials.
Now here’s the really clever part. One of the reasons the experience of vaping cannabis can kind of suck (pun intended) is that the size of particle created when the oil is heated isn’t actually optimal to be absorbed. So, you’re not really feeling the healing. Airgraft got fully into the physics and particle dynamics of the process and designed a tailored heating profile for every oil to address this problem.
The resulting Airgraft 2.0 system delivers an experience that just isn’t matched by any other pocket vaporization product out there. And not only does the gentler process mean that none of those harmful compounds are created, you get to enjoy up to 30% more extract from every gram.
But there’s no point having amazing tech if no-one can afford it. Airgraft was determined to create a system that genuinely democratized cannabis consumption. They wanted the world’s most premium experience to be accessible to everyday and casual users, not just newbie weekend tokers with dollars to burn
The main reason vaping generally costs more is that oil and pod have always been retailed together. This maximizes markup, so users pay around 2x street price. So Airgraft hacked the system. Their simple innovation was to decouple the oil from the tech by giving the pods to the growers for free. Only the oil is retailed, cutting the retail cost of a typical pod in half.
So far so good for the cannabis producer and the dispensary. But all that amazing medical-grade tech in the pod has to be paid for somehow. This is where Airgraft 2.0 gets even smarter. It comes with a membership program. Airgraft users pay $10 a month for access to unlimited pods. Even with the cost of membership factored in, Airgraft 2.0 members still pay roughly the equivalent of street price for every gram. Truly a game-changer for the industry.
But hang on — didn’t we say that all cannabis brands were locked out of the big tech platforms? So how do you administer a membership program without an app?
This is where the magic happens.
Airgraft pods need to be smart, so they only work in a member’s device. Airgraft’s radical answer is Magic Key; a digital chromatic code that can be read by any Airgraft pod directly from the screen of any device.
Yes you read that right. A QR code on the product links to Airgraft’s web application. This triggers a unique combination of colored flashes, which write to the pod via a built-in light sensor when it’s placed on the screen.
Airgraft says that the Airgraft 2.0 system is just the beginning, and that they’ll be developing more, even cooler tech in the future for delivering therapeutics and other life-enhancing compounds. If so, that’s good news.
Aigraft proves that necessity really is the mother of invention. This truly is a game-changing product, bringing a tabletop vaporization experience to a pocket device. Perhaps more importantly, it comes with a breakthrough price-tag too. By hacking the business model to cut the typical pod price in half, Airgraft has done the seemingly impossible: delivered a cutting edge vaporization system for the same price as street product.
The general public can access the membership on Airgraft.com beginning July 1st for a monthly $10 fee. Access Airgraft before the official July 1st launch and receive a limited-edition Starter Kit, strictly first-come-first-served. For more information, visit Airgraft.com or follow the brand on Instagram.
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