We interviewed Mathew Enfield at UK Vape Trades Facebook Group who won the eCig Directory UK Awards 2015 for Best Community Individual to find out more what they have achieved.
We started about 1.5 years ago with our Facebook group UK Vape Trades, which was aimed at helping to provide a place to trade and sell used vaping equipment, we grew rather quickly and started to offer out of our own pocket services like “sample runs”, which we posted out small 1.5ml sample of juices we disliked for other to try for free and help other sample different juices, this then moved on to being sent samples from vendors to send to members. Though we no longer do this for the safety side now we continue to focus on our members. 99% of all our group rules are made by the members voting on them, which made us stand out from others were the members had there say in how a group would run.
We then started growing more and wanting to help many quit smoking and started to get business cards printed and handed out, and quickly became a place for more than sales and trades but advice on introducing people to vaping, and what kits are good, and what can work and ways to fix issues. We also had a small Vendor base which we supported and they offered our members a discount So worked very well. We soon started to help a couple of small charity that members posted on the group and the quickly moved to running monthly charity donation and collections, people would send old items to be auctioned off for charity, this then moved to vendors offering items to be donated to be auctioned off. We soon started having many vendors supporting charity that members would vote on, and then we started a sponsor side were a vendor would donate stock for advertising on the group, having a large member base by then Vendors gain rather large sales increases while helping support the group and its charity side.
We then started our group page UK Vape Trades where we used it for update for charity side more to help keep the group more easier to navigate, which quickly led to a forum Breath of Fresh Vape So we could keep all records and details of what we did and a place to bring more people together and help one another. We now also opened a Homebrew group which allow mixer a place to get advice on making their own juices from concentrates. We also kind of change our name to Breath of Fresh Vape, but being to big on Facebook we could not change the name there, but know as UKVT or BOFV now.
We then looked at other ways to promote vendors and came up with our #VendorsDay event, where vendors could for one day a month advertising on our group, with over 11, 000 members now we have a huge following on this event, with close to 200 members joining on that one day alone and with over 100 vendors all coming onto the group posting discounts and getting sales we been a huge success, So much So other groups have now copied this event for there group, Liking to remain different we just been in talks with Vendors to bring another new event to change the game again and to keep our group fresh and exciting with fresh ideas, this is still publicly posted but we hope within the next 2 weeks we will be going live with the “Juice of the Week” event.
We still continue to run our sponsor side and have 2 years of bookings to get a 2 week slot on our group, but we had to stop taking names now as So busy, we now raised over £13,000 for different charity’s, and all with just 6 staff that all do not get paid in any way or kind Stella Enfield (my Wife), Dave, Simon, David.and Laura and myself who spends most my time on the group now. We have been posted about in local Hampshire news papers for donation to RSPCA for £1300 and also adopted a cat at the same time 🙂 , and we donate to many other large causes which members all vote on.
We work as a team, were no one admin has control over the group, we all are equal and members have there say in what we do. We hope 1 year from now we continue to grow in support from vendors and members and continue to help many thousand quit smoking and come to vaping, as well as continue to raise many more thousands for charity.
Mathew