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HUNI, WE’RE HOME

Huni Badger is an innovative new vaporizer that was a long time in the making from a team of industry vets who wanted to create a game-changing product

If there’s one lesson anybody can learn from the Huni Badger it’s this: Don’t ever give up on a good idea.

The Huni Badger — an impressive vertical vaporizer that debuted on the market last fall — is a testament to the importance of coming back to an idea you believe in, even if you’ve put it on the back-burner for a while.

We all have those ideas and visions. The ones we keep coming back to. The ones we think about it and say, “I should really do that.” The ones we’d probably regret if we never saw to fruition. Luckily, the team behind the Huni Badger never met regret. Instead, it made the idea a reality and the Huni Badger debuted last September after two years of research and development.

“This unit, once it was completed, we thought it was a game-changer,” says owner Tommy Lin.

The Huni Badger packs a punch and it stands out in the current copycat industry. A few of the features that makes the Huni Badger different than others on the market:

• It uses a ceramic heating tube, called a Huni Tip, to heat itself to the perfect temperature and give users a clean, pure hit. This is the first product to market with that technology.

• It’s not tethered to power outlets like most vaporizers. Instead, the Huni Badger is powered by rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries, so if power is lost, spares are easy to carry along.

• There are no glowing red coils in the Huni Badger, which means you don’t run the risk of burning your extracts.

“You just rail it for as long as you can,” Lin says. “You can dab it from anywhere.”

He adds about the response to the unit so far: “It’s going great. Everybody’s that’s tested it has been blown away.”

The story behind the Huni Badger is a little more complicated than just taking a couple years to make the right product. The team behind the Huni Badger actually creates a ton of vape products every year as an original design manufacturer, which means other companies buy them, brand them and bring them to the market.

“We helped so many brands,” Line says. “We want a piece of the pie too.”

That’s why since 2014, Lin and his team had a dream of making their own product. They’d still manufacture vaporizers for other companies, but they wanted something that was all theirs. They definitely had the ability and the know-how.

“A lot of products just come with the basic idea,” Lin says. “We come up with the technology behind it.”

The downfall of working on so many other products for other clients? Sometimes your own ideas get put on the shelf. Work began on the Huni Badger in 2014. By mid-2015, there was a prototype. By the end of 2015, there was another. Then the Huni Badger debuted the following September.

It wasn’t the quickest process, but the Huni Badger team also isn’t in the industry to make a quick buck. They’ve been manufacturing e-cigs and vaporizers for 10 years. And with the Huni Badger, this isn’t an effort to jump in the market, make some money and go away. No, their plan includes building out attachments and improvements for the Huni Badger that will be released over time.

Right now, there’s just the one unit and a couple attachments, but the next Huni Badger products will build off the unit itself.

“Instead of coming out with a new product that will make this obsolete,” Lin says. “We’re building on the product. So people can expand and not get scared next year that they’ll have to buy something new.”

It’s something vapers know all too well. And it’s a common technique among the Johnny-come-lately companies. That’s just another thing that makes Huni Badger different. It’s not just looking at sales immediately, it’s looking at building long-term customers who will invest three-to-five years into a product line.

“Most people,” Lin says, “when their sales start dwindling, they try to see what’s the next big thing.”

But at Huni Badger, they’re keenly and uniquely tuned into the market. Because remember: They’re making all these products for other companies. Some big-name products are coming out of a factory they own.

“We’ve made so many vaporizers, I know the shortcomings,” Lin says. “I try to overcome the shortcomings and try to come up with something new.”

Their company is split between the U.S. and China. The manufacturing happens in China. Half the research and design does too. The other half happens in Las Vegas, which Huni Badger officially calls home. Vegas is also home to its warehouse operations and its e-liquid business.

“We know what everybody’s making,” Lin says. “We keep ourselves on top of the new technology that’s available. So whenever there’s something new, we’re going to incorporate it into our machines.”

That’s one of the advantages of being so entrenched in the industry behind-the-scenes. The Huni Badger team knows what’s coming before customers do.

And that’s why it’s good to know they’ll never give up on a good idea.

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