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SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE (2004–2005)
James Monsees didn’t know what he was doing anymore. Standing outside Stanford University’s Design Loft one night in late 2004, a burning cigarette perched between his fingers, the twenty-four-year-old suddenly couldn’t square who he was with the smoky mess of paper and tobacco in his hand. Here he was, well on his way to a master’s degree from one of the most prestigious product design programs in the country, and yet he was still sucking on a burning tube of tobacco and chemicals, knowing full well it was terrible for his health. It felt primitive. More than that, it felt dumb. He looked over at his classmate and smoke-break buddy Adam Bowen, who was puffing away on his own cigarette, and felt only bewilderment. Why were they both still doing this?
Adam couldn’t think of a single good reason, either. He’d tried to quit smoking plenty of times before—always cold turkey, never successfully—and yet there he stood, filling his lungs with tar and smoke. “We’re relatively smart people,” the two marveled, “and we’re out here burning sticks.” There had to be something better. Why shouldn’t they be the ones to create it?
The pair’s late-night breakthrough came about two years after Adam enrolled in Stanford’s graduate product design program, which taught about a dozen students a year to approach the craft through a unique blend of engineering, business, art, psychology, and sociology. He’d started at Stanford in 2002, four years after graduating from Pomona College with a degree in physics. The quiet, cerebral Tucson, Arizona, native lived up to the small liberal arts college’s reputation for attracting the “smartest” students of California’s seven linked Claremont Colleges. Anybody who’d known Adam as a kid wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he’d excelled in school and gone on to study product design. He’d spent his childhood drawing detailed renderings of cars and planes—anything with an engine, really. It was a fascination he never grew out of. At Pomona, he took a special interest in researching NASA’s so-called Vomit Comet, a reduced-gravity aircraft notorious for making its crew members ill, and he joined the Sigma Xi scientific research honor society.
Adam took a few years off between degrees, but eventually, the pull of the classroom called him to Stanford, where it was immediately clear to peers that he was the real deal. “Adam was obviously a standout from the beginning,” says classmate Colter Leys. “He just had an amazing, easy facility for things that other people had a hard time with.” He was quiet but easygoing, enigmatic but funny and warm, once you got to know him. Stress seemed to roll off his shoulders—and there was plenty of that at Stanford.
James Monsees arrived at Stanford a year after Adam, but it didn’t take long for them to become a duo. “There was a crowd of people who smoked cigarettes, and they were kind of in that crowd together,” Leys says. Small talk and brainstorms over cigarette breaks proved enough to help the two men form a bond.
James had always been an improbable smoker. Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, he was raised by his physician mother to hate cigarettes. Her father had been a heavy smoker, and she’d lost him to lung cancer far too young. James carried that loss with him. But adolescence being what it is, and James being who he was, the temptation to try a cigarette eventually grew too heavy to cast off. He had always been a curious kid, the kind who loved to take things apart and put them back together. As a teenager, when he realized his parents had no intention of buying him a car for his sixteenth birthday, he built himself one instead, filling his parents’ garage with spare parts until he could make them run. When he was a young teenager, he decided he wanted to try cigarettes for himself, too. By the time he graduated from St. Louis’s tony Whitfield school in 1998 and moved on to Kenyon College in the tiny town of Gambier, Ohio, he was a regular smoker. “I hated cigarettes,” James would say later. “Every time I picked one up, I felt conflicted about it.” But addiction has a way of drowning out internal conflict.
After graduating from Kenyon in 2002 with dual degrees in physics and studio art, James returned home to St. Louis to try his hand at product design. He worked at a company called Metaphase Design Group, which specialized in ergonomically friendly products. Despite his youth and inexperience, James’s talent and charisma were obvious immediately. “James is a very inspiring designer whose interests, abilities and skills are beyond his years,” a coworker gushed on James’s LinkedIn page, adding that he “possesses an entrepreneurial flair that sparks innovation and discovery.” After about a year in the workforce, James decided to explore that flair. He packed his bags and headed west to the manicured lawns and terra-cotta roofs of Stanford’s California campus to study product design.
Adam and James did not have the world’s most obvious friendship. Adam was studious and low-key, prone to getting lost in thought; James was boisterous and social, always cracking jokes and erupting into his signature loud, barking laugh. Adam listened more than he spoke, while James was happy to fill the silence. Both men still looked like undergrads back then, with shaggy haircuts—Adam’s dirty blond, James’s brown—but Adam’s dark eyes, deep voice, and long, angular face gave him a certain gravity next to bearded, baby-faced James. Or maybe it was more about how he acted than how he looked. Adam was consistently described as “stoic,” a word often tossed around in Silicon Valley circles that value drive and hard work. James was harder to put a label on. He had an infectious laugh and a glint in his eye, but both could disappear in an instant.
Still, the pair had enough in common to strike up a friendship. Both were bright and talented, with a clear gift for and lifelong pull toward product design. Both loved solving complex problems and figuring out what makes things tick. Both tended to work in late-night, marathon brainstorming sessions. And, though both had tried to quit smoking before, both were frequently bumming cigarettes and hanging around outside the Design Loft, shooting the breeze and lighting up. It was during one of these smoke breaks, on that winter night in 2004, that Adam and James realized they didn’t want to burn sticks anymore. All those years of loving and hating smoking in equal measure had crystallized into one moment of recognition: enough was enough. If they couldn’t find a way to quit smoking, they would invent one for themselves.
As existential crises go, theirs was a well-timed one. It was thesis season at Stanford, and a cigarette alternative seemed like a great idea for a project. (Previously, both men were working on projects that involved furniture. Adam was designing a desk that could be folded up without needing to be cleared of its clutter, while James was plugging away at user-adaptable chairs.) After their smoky epiphany outside the design center, the pair began brainstorming and trading emails about how they could design a product for people like them: people who wanted to ditch cigarettes but hadn’t had luck with the stale and largely ineffective cessation products currently on the market, like nicotine gums and patches; people who couldn’t or didn’t want to stop cold turkey; people who didn’t want the stigma and risk that came with smoking, but who also didn’t want to lose the sensory, social, and ritualistic elements of the habit. “What we realized was this was kind of a false choice, this ‘quit or die’ mentality,” Adam recalled in a 2019 interview. “It wasn’t that I really wanted to quit; I just wanted to minimize the harm from smoking.”
With about six months left before they had to present their theses, both men began pouring their collective energy into their new idea. They began surveying people on campus about everything they hated, and loved, about smoking. They found that their classmates, like many smokers, were conflicted. In interviews, they told Adam and James that they loved the ritual of smoking, the way it looked, even the elegant way smoke unfurled from the cigarette and the sound of taking a drag. But they hated the smell, the stigma, and the knowledge that the habit could someday kill them. Adam and James began taking apart and rebuilding every tobacco product they could find, searching for a way to get rid of the bad parts of smoking without losing the things people liked.
Pretty soon, Adam and James started talking about their idea at the product design program’s Tuesday night workshops, where students could bounce ideas off professors and their classmates. They knew they wanted to create a product that delivered nicotine in a safer way than cigarettes, they knew it would need to be portable and easy to use, and they knew they wanted it to look more interesting than a cigarette, classmate Leys remembers. During a lunchtime brainstorming session with their classmates during which people shouted out ideas and James scribbled the good ones on Post-It Notes and slapped them on the wall, they landed on a name: “Ploom.” It had the right ring to it, and it played off the concept of smoking without being too heavy-handed.
Copyright © 2021 by Jamie Ducharme