How many steps does it take for an e-cigarette to be born? Revealing the R&D team’s obsessive-compulsive disorder for details
The 20-member R&D team includes an engineer who has been engaged in materials research for 15 years, a "taste master" who specializes in food flavor blending, and a "fault finder" who used to work in quality control in the automotive industry. Their daily routine is to overturn and start over in countless experiments:
Material screening: Pick out the one that "does not choke the throat" from 300 kinds of silicone
The silicone material of the cigarette holder directly affects the user experience. The team has tested 300 kinds of food-grade silicone, checking them one by one from hardness, air permeability to high temperature resistance. "Some silicones are too hard, and they hurt your gums after biting for a long time; some have poor air permeability and will produce odor." Material engineer Wang Gong showed the sample wall in the laboratory, "The one we finally selected, after 5,000 bite tests, still maintains softness, and has moderate adsorption and will not stick to your lips."
Flavor development: 200 debuggings just to "feel like biting a real strawberry"
"You can't just mix flavors and call it 'strawberry flavor'." The workbench of perfumer Sister Li is full of test tubes, "The strawberry concentrate we use must be selected from fruits in three production areas, and then combined with 0.3% lactic acid to simulate fruit acid, and finally add 0.1% menthol to enhance the refreshing feeling - this is the result of the 217th debugging." In order to avoid the "chemical feeling", the team insists on "the original taste of ingredients first", and all flavor raw materials must pass SGS testing to ensure that they do not contain heavy metals and harmful additives.
Quality control: "Finding faults" is a daily routine
Quality control supervisor Lao Zhou has a nickname called "magnifying glass". He led the team to formulate 28 testing standards: scratches on the surface of the cigarette rod cannot exceed 0.5 mm, the clearance between the cigarette cartridge and the cigarette rod must be controlled within 0.02 mm, and even the clarity of the font on the packaging has strict regulations. "Once a batch of goods was returned due to a 0.1% deviation in printing color. The supplier thought we were too harsh, but the products that users get must be 'zero defects'." Lao Zhou turned out the test report, which densely recorded the "physical examination data" of each batch of products.
It is this "seriousness" that makes the new products launched by the team have zero negative reviews after they are launched. One user wrote in a review: "The curvature of the mouthpiece fits the lips perfectly, and the strawberry flavor is like eating fresh strawberries. You can feel that it was made with care." The R&D director said: "We are not afraid of slowness, but we are afraid of roughness. The value of an e-cigarette is hidden in the "comfort" that users don't say out loud."
In this fast-paced era, this R&D team uses the belief of "not afraid of slowness, but afraid of roughness" to polish the seemingly simple e-cigarette into a work full of warmth and craftsmanship. They have used countless tests and overthrows to prove that truly good products have always been hidden in those times of struggling with details and in every "comfort" that users experience. And this adherence to quality will surely become the confidence for them to move forward steadily in the industry.
