We Spent Thousands Looking for the Perfect Hemp Vape. Nobody Was Doing It Right. So We Built It.

This is the story of how Zaza Platinum started. It's not a particularly glamorous story. There's no eureka moment, no dramatic pivot, no VC funding. It's just the story of people who smoked a lot of subpar products and eventually got frustrated enough to do something about it.

The Search

For a long time, we were customers. We tried everything on the Irish market. Disposables, cartridges, oils — if it was available in Ireland, we bought it. We wanted to find the one. The product that ticked every box. Clean ingredients. Authentic flavour. No nicotine. No synthetic aftertaste. A hit that actually felt good.

We didn't find it.

What we found instead was a pattern. Most products were one of two things:

• Cheap and unknown — no COA, no ingredient transparency, no idea what you were actually putting in your body
• Premium-priced but still compromised — nicotine in the formula, PG/VG as base carriers, artificial flavouring dressed up in expensive branding

The flavours that claimed to be "authentic" tasted like sweets. The products that claimed to be "clean" still had a carrier you didn't want. The ones with no nicotine often had something else you had to look up. There was always something.

The Money We Spent

Before a single Zaza Platinum product went live, we spent thousands — on sampling, on sourcing, on lab testing, on products that didn't make the cut. We sent samples back. We rejected formulations that were close but not right. We tested terpene suppliers until we found ones that delivered genuine botanical profiles, not chemical approximations.

We spent hours — more than we care to admit — in sourcing calls, reading COAs, comparing extraction methods, talking to people who actually understood what separated a good terpene profile from a mediocre one. We probably annoyed a lot of suppliers with how specific our requirements were.

Zero nicotine was non-negotiable from day one. Zero PG/VG was non-negotiable. Authentic terpenes were non-negotiable. Third-party lab testing was non-negotiable. Everything else was open for discussion — but those four were the floor.

The Moment It Clicked

The first sample of Lemon Cherry Gelato that hit the standard was the moment we knew. You know how sometimes you try something and you don't need to think about whether it's good — it just is? That was it. The draw was clean. The flavour was right. The finish was smooth. No edge, no synthetic note, no question mark. Just a genuinely good hit.

We passed it around. Everyone agreed. That was the bar — and everything since has been built around maintaining it.

Why "Designed by Smokers, for Smokers"

We say this because it's true, and because it matters. The people making decisions at Zaza Platinum aren't marketers who saw a trending category. They're people who have been smoking for years and care deeply about what that experience actually feels like.

That means we optimise for things that don't show up in a product description — the draw resistance, the flavour consistency from first hit to last, the way the terpenes interact on the exhale. These aren't things you get right by accident. You get them right by caring, by testing, and by having enough personal experience to know the difference.

Where We Are Now

Zaza Platinum launched in 2024. We have five flavours, thousands of customers across Ireland and the EU, and a standard that hasn't moved since day one. Every batch still gets independently lab tested. The formula still contains zero nicotine, zero PG/VG, zero artificial flavouring. The COA is still available on request for every batch.

The search for the perfect hemp vape took us a long time and cost us more than we expected. But it also gave us the one thing no shortcut can buy: the absolute certainty that what we're making is genuinely the best version of what it could be.

Puff Puff Pass. 💨