The disposable vape ban landed on 1 June 2025, and most of the media attention went to the big names. Lost Mary, Elf Bar, SKE Crystal. The brands everyone recognised from corner shop displays and school confiscation trays. Reasonable enough. Those were the brands that had to reinvent themselves overnight.
But while the household names scrambled to launch prefilled alternatives, a less obvious winner emerged from the fallout. Titan, a brand most casual vapers had never heard of, started picking up serious market share in a category the ban accidentally supercharged.
The Category Nobody Was Watching
Before June 2025, big puff vapes occupied a weird grey area. Products offering 10,000 or 20,000 puffs technically existed but sat in a regulatory blind spot. Some were TPD compliant. Many were not. The lines were blurry, and enforcement was inconsistent. Retailers who stocked them did so cautiously, and the products never hit the mainstream consciousness the way a £5 disposable from a newsagent did.
The ban changed the maths. Single-use disposables vanished from shelves. Prefilled pod kits replaced them for people who wanted simplicity. But a chunk of the market wanted something in between. Not a full refillable setup with coils, liquid, and maintenance. Not a tiny prefilled pod that runs out after 600 puffs either. They wanted high capacity, long-lasting, and minimal effort.
That is exactly where Titan vape products slotted in. Big batteries, large prefilled pods, and puff counts that meant you weren’t swapping pods every few hours. The product answered a question that millions of former disposable users were asking, but the big brands were slow to address.
Why Titan Gained Ground So Fast
Three things worked in Titan’s favour during the second half of 2025.
First, they weren’t carrying the baggage of the disposable era. Lost Mary and Elf Bar had brand recognition, sure. But that recognition came with associations. School gates, underage sales, and environmental waste. Those brands had to rebuild their image while simultaneously launching new hardware. Titan walked into the post-ban market without any of that history weighing them down.
Second, the product range was built for the gap in the market. Titan kits offered high puff counts through large capacity prefilled pods, not through the illegal oversized disposables that Trading Standards were actively seizing. Everything stayed within TPD limits. The kit itself was rechargeable. You kept the battery, swapped the pod when empty. For consumers who’d been buying 3,500 illegal puff disposables from dodgy corner shops, this was the first legal product that came close to matching what they were used to.
Third, online retailers moved fast. Physical shops were still figuring out their post-ban stock mix when online vape retailers already had Titan products listed, reviewed, and shipping. As the London Post covered in its analysis of how technology is transforming consumer habits, digital infrastructure now shapes purchasing behaviour in ways that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. Vaping followed that pattern exactly. The customers who’d previously bought on impulse at a counter now found themselves browsing online for the first time. And Titan was there waiting.
The Pricing Sweet Spot
There’s a financial angle that doesn’t get discussed enough. Disposable vapes were cheap per unit but expensive per puff. A £5 BM600 gave you 600 puffs. A Titan kit costs more upfront, but the per-puff cost drops significantly when you factor in replacement pod pricing.
For the millions of UK vapers suddenly doing cost comparisons they’d never bothered with before, this arithmetic landed well. Especially with the looming vape liquid tax. From October 2026, every 10ml of e-liquid sold in the UK faces an excise duty of £2.20. That applies to prefilled pods too. High-capacity pods spread that cost across more puffs, making the economics even more favourable for products in Titan’s category.
What Happens Next
The brand has momentum, but the market is getting crowded. Every major manufacturer now has a big puff offering. Lost Mary’s Nera range, SKE’s CL6000, Hayati’s Pro Ultra. The window of relative obscurity that let Titan build its customer base is closing.
The question is whether first mover advantage in the post-ban big puff space translates into lasting loyalty. In vaping, brand loyalty tends to be flavour-driven. If people find a flavour profile they love in a Titan pod, they’ll stick. If not, they’ll switch the moment something better arrives.
What is clear is that the disposable ban didn’t just reshape which products people buy. It reshuffled which brands matter. As the London Post has explored in its coverage of UK regulation, government intervention creates winners and losers that nobody predicted in advance. Titan’s rise is a textbook example. Not the biggest brand, not the most marketed, not the most recognised. Just the one that had the right product at the right time, in the right place.
