Background

In October of 2014 Leif Martin (aka qualus) asked a question from the public: “Are we lazy?”. He was worried that in the 4 years e-cigarettes had been growing in numbers among the tens of thousands of users in Finland, no one had promoted the cause of vapers so he suggested we should get organized.

Teemu Laitinen, who used to sell e-cigarettes, contacted Leif and offered his help to get the association organized. Teemu, in association with a few other persons, had maintained the Vapers.fi community which gathered vapers and published news regarding e-cigarettes. After several hours of consulting between them, Teemu and Leif began to agree on what the new association should be like and Teemu offered the pre-existing community as a starting point to the association.

People have tried to organize before in Finland. A few active users of Finland’s largest e-cigarette forum founded an association called Savutta in 2012. It gathered supporters in a fast pace and represented vapers in some medias. However, the founders soon found out that the association had far too few active members so all of the work was done by one or two people and soon they were forgotten due to lack of activity.

Both Teemu and Leif realized this, so they knew the new association would need more active members to make the operation efficient and reasonable. Teemu sent out an open invitation to the forum in December 17^th 2014 with the intention to find enthusiastic and motivated people to form the new association as well as act as the officials in its first term.

As a result a group of 11 people was formed with the goal to found a credible and influential association to promote the cause of vapers. For a month and a half the group worked attentively working out how to make the association function and how to organize it. This was finalized by the constitutive meeting at February 5^th 2015 where Vapers Finland was established.

Since February 2015 Teemu Laitinen is no longer in affiliation with Vapers Finland.

Founding members

Leif Martin (qualus)
Teemu Laitinen (esmoke)
Sami Eräluoto (conii)
Jari Ollikka (rotax)
Maarit Salminen (marzu882)
Jori Taina (Yakousei)
Juhani Orelma (deetwo7)
Arttu Rantanen (kirka)