Dollar, Good Life Vapor unlikely success stories

ALBANY — There are so many elements that make rock drummer-turned-businessman Jeremy Dollar’s success story compelling. Dollar taught himself essentially everything he knows about the e-cigarette “vaping” business and used that knowledge to create a company, Good Life Vapor, that has tens of thousands of customers in 26 countries and all 50 states.

But stripped to their essence, Dollar’s and Good Life Vapor’s success stories are a product of one life-changing decision.

“I wanted to quit smoking, it’s as simple as that,” Dollar said.

One of Southwest Georgia’s unlikeliest of business CEOs allowed that desire to better his own life to lead him to a nascent, virtually unknown at the time, industry that was just starting to filter out from larger cities into communities like Albany. And his quest eventually bore fruit that includes three Good Life Vapor retail outlets (with the opening of a new store Friday at 2709 Gillionville Road), a Lee County warehouse where Good Life’s vaping “juices” and other gear are created, and a web presence that has given him and his now 23-person staff a massive global footprint.

“I knew nothing about business,” said Dollar, who left early forays in music (as drummer for Monroe Brown, one of the two or three best rock bands to come out of Albany) and the tech industry (senior IT technician at Marine Corps Logistics Base-Albany) to chase an only partially formed dream. “Even after we started having some success with Good Life Vapor, I didn’t know what I was doing.

“When PayPal froze my account because of their strict no e-cig policy, I was introduced to an accountant in Chicago who told me, ‘You’re doing everything wrong.’ He introduced me to things like corporate taxes, business accounts, payroll, limited liability corporations. He told me, ‘If you’re going to do this the right way, you have to become legit.’”

That bit of truth is just one of the many elements of Dollar’s long, strange trip that makes his story and his business so amazing.

Dollar used Monroe Brown as his creative outlet from his teens into his early 20s before walking away from what many saw as a promising musical career.

“It was a lot of work and little payoff,” said Dollar, a bear of a man with a childlike grin that lights up his face. “And I don’t necessarily mean the money. It just wasn’t very fulfilling. I decided to use my creativity for something else.”

Dollar worked at the Albany-based Marine base until Good Life Vapor so consumed his life he could no longer do both. It was at the base that the germ of an idea that would become a successful global business was planted.

“I was on my third day of going cold turkey when one of my co-workers at the base told me he’d bring me something that would help me,” Dollar said of his efforts to stop smoking. “He brought in an e-cigarette that he said had helped him. I tried it, and the taste was horrible. But I did decide to do a little research on e-cigs after that.”

That research led Dollar to invest what little money he’d saved into trying to invent a better vaping mouse trap.

“(The e-cigarette) opened my eyes to the fact that just the act of mimicking smoking helped a person deal with the cravings,” he said. “But the flavors of the juices that were available here were terrible.”

So Dollar started edging his way into the mostly DIY vaping community, learning everything he could about the products. With an expanded knowledge of the ingredients in the juices that would become the backbone of his business, he decided to make up his own in his small apartment.

“Before I quit smoking, I used to roll my own cigarettes,” he said. “I still make my own body wash and chapstick. In doing research, I came across a site called ‘Perfumers’ Apprentice.’ Their products are water-based, and as I gathered a bit of information here and there, I decided I was ready to create my own vaping flavor.”

Dollar turned to a familiar product for inspiration.

“Bubblegum is something that people keep in their mouths all day, it’s a flavor pretty much everyone likes,” he said. “I came up with a flavor based on watermelon bubblegum.”

That flavor — later dubbed “Melon Boba” — would become one of four of the more than 90 juices that Good Life Vapor creates, that would go viral, creating a sensation in the vaping industry.

“I met other local vapers on Facebook, and we’d get together at Mellow Mushroom regularly,” Dollar said. “I started bringing samples of my juices, and they all loved them. Pretty soon it got to where people were contacting me, asking me to make them bottles of juice.”

Dollar’s homemade product grew so popular, he went to the local Biobuzz store in Albany and asked the proprietor if there was any interest in selling to vapers.

“They said they’d take 40 bottles to see how it would go, and all of a sudden I had $300,” Dollar said, relishing that moment. “I was as happy as I could be. But a week later they called me from Biobuzz and said they’d sold out all of my supply. They ordered 50 more bottles. I said, ‘Hmm, maybe there’s something to this.’”

In August of 2012, flush with the success at Biobuzz, Dollar officially started Good Life Vapor as an homage to his hometown. He took the money he’d made and put it into a website that he reasoned would allow him to widely market his product. The concept was an immediate flop.

“I didn’t know anything about marketing or business,” Dollar said. “I was bleeding money, so I took the website down in November.”

Moments after the Good Life Vapor website went dark, Dollar’s email started blowing up with messages like, “Where are you? We want to buy your product.” Wary but determined, Dollar made the site live again.

“That first night, I had no orders when I went to bed,” he said. “When I woke up the next morning, I had 40. I’d made a new absinth-flavored juice called ‘Magic Fairy,’ and it would become our first product to go viral.”

Dollar was still working at the Marine Base at the time, so he started paying friends to help him fill the orders that were coming in. When online reviewer Phil Busardo gave his Melon Boba a “street shout-out” review, suddenly things went nuts.

“The next day after Phil’s review, we had 400 orders,” Dollar said. “I was finally fired at the Marine base — and I should have been, I was doing Good Life work on the computers there — and things just went out of control. I called my mom and told her, ‘Mom, I got fired,’ and then I settled into what I knew was my career.

“It had been a hobby for so long, but now it was a business.”

Dollar lost some of his DIY employees when he went legit with Good Life Vapor, but time has shown that he’s on a roll with making the right business decisions. On a whim, he decided to open a retail outlet on Philema Road — “The worst possible place for a retail business” — just to augment his online business for the “four or five customers I figured we’d get in on a good day.” On opening day, lines of customers formed around the building.

Within eight months, having outgrown the location on Philema, Dollar opened his “dream store” a few miles west on the same road.

“People told me I was crazy when I renovated that store,” Dollar said. “We put in everything I thought should be in a store for vapers — comfortable places to lounge, a big-screen TV, drinks, coffee. I was a little nervous on opening day, but it was mind-blowing. We made back our original investment in the first month and a half.”

Dollar opened a second Good Life Vapor retail store in Americus at 1206 Crawford Street and will open his second Albany store Friday. He also has a warehouse at 1561 U.S. Highway 19 in Leesburg. All told, he now has 23 full-time employees.

“We are truly like a family,” Dollar said of his staff. “I don’t have a minimum wage, I pay the employees well and I promote from within. When I started this, I had no concept of business infrastructure. But now, with each layer of growth, we add more infrastructure: payroll, HR, marketing, brand ambassadors, lab technicians, retail.

“Yes, this has become a pretty significant business. But we do it mainly to help people. Vaping is 95 percent safer than cigarette smoking, and it really does help people quit smoking. There are no carcinogens, and even though some of our juices include nicotine, we have non-nicotine products, too. I know this works. When I had my last checkup, my doctor said my lungs looked as clean as someone’s who’d never smoked. And I smoked for 15 years before I discovered vaping.”

With a keen eye on pop culture — his other viral juices are “Zombie Blood” and “Deadly Sin” — this most unlikely of CEOs keeps building his empire. He’s filled more than 130,000 web orders and 120,000 in-store transactions with not one health complaint. And he’s still listening to his customers.

“We’re opening the store in west Albany because a lot of our customers said it was tough for them to get over to Philema after work,” he said. “I’ve always listened to the people who are part of this community.”

The people Dollar has never listened to, though, are the ones who told him he couldn’t run a successful business.

“There were so many people who told me ‘You can’t do this, you’re going to fail,’” he said. “I’m living proof, though, that you can do anything if you really want to.”