V2 Cigs: what happened to the brand that defined the first e-cigarette era
For a few years V2 Cigs was the default recommendation in almost every e-cigarette review. Then it disappeared, almost overnight. The story of how is more useful than any spec sheet.
This page has existed, in one form or another, since 2013. Back then it was a product review: battery life, cartridge flavours, how the automatic model compared to the manual one. Keeping that review online in 2026 would be dishonest, because the product it described cannot be bought. What follows is what actually became of the brand — which turned out to be the more instructive story.
What V2 Cigs was
V2 Cigs was the flagship brand of VMR Products, a Florida company that became one of the largest sellers of "cigalikes" in the United States — the generation of e-cigarettes shaped like a tobacco cigarette, using pre-filled cartridges rather than refillable tanks. It sold direct to consumers online at a moment when that was still unusual, ran a large affiliate programme, and for a stretch of the early 2010s was the brand most likely to top an e-cigarette comparison table.
VMR also ran Vapor Couture, a separate line aimed specifically at women, built around styling and accessories rather than hardware specifications.
How it ended
In October 2018, Juul Labs acquired VMR Products in a deal reported at US$75 million. Within weeks, V2 stopped filling orders in the United States, and by November 2018 the US operation was closed. Customers with cartridge-based devices were left holding hardware with no supply of the proprietary refills that made it work.
The closure was not a single bad decision. Reporting at the time pointed to losses of roughly US$25.3 million accumulated over the preceding years, and VMR itself cited three pressures: regulatory uncertainty, competition from enormously better-capitalised entrants, and new tariffs on Chinese manufacturing — where essentially all of the hardware was made. The UK arm continued to trade separately for a period afterwards.
Why this matters beyond one brand
The V2 story is the clearest illustration of the structural problem with the cigalike model: the device was worthless without the manufacturer's own cartridges. When the company left the market, every device it had ever sold became scrap. That closed-cartridge dependency is exactly what pushed the market towards refillable tanks and, later, towards standardised pods.
The lesson buyers took from 2018 was not "pick a better brand". It was "do not buy hardware that only one company can feed."
It is also a reminder of how quickly the ground moved. A brand could lead almost every review table in 2013 and be gone five years later — not because the product got worse, but because the regulatory and capital environment around it changed shape entirely.
If you arrived here looking for V2 cartridges
The brand's US operation is permanently closed and there is no official supply. Several third-party sellers have marketed V2-compatible cartridges and e-liquid since, with the usual caveat that compatibility claims from after-market vendors are not verified by the original manufacturer. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy any of them.