Meet the small-town Michigan company behind your favorite glass-tipped vape pens 

If you’ve ripped live rosin out of a glass-tipped vape lately, there’s a decent chance a small Michigan team helped make that experience smoother—and safer.

MICHIGAN—Most Michiganders can name their favorite vape brand.

Almost nobody can name the company that helped make that vape hit the way it does.

That’s because vaporizer hardware usually lives in the background of the cannabis industry—until it ruins your day. You don’t think about the cartridge until it clogs, leaks, tastes like pennies, or stops working halfway through what was supposed to be a peaceful evening.

Dana Shoched has spent more than a decade building a company to prevent that moment.

She’s the president and CEO of O2VAPE, a veteran-owned vape hardware manufacturer based in Temperance, Michigan. And while O2VAPE isn’t a brand most consumers seek out on purpose, plenty of Michigan stoners have interacted with it anyway, often through the glass-tipped vapes that have become the go-to delivery system for live rosin and live resin.

If you’ve been enjoying that clean, terpene-forward flavor lately, there’s a decent chance this small team in southeast Michigan had something to do with it, Shoched told The ‘Gander. 

“We’re the oldest manufacturer out here,” Shoched said. “All my competitors came after me.”

From the Navy to cannabis

Shoched’s path to cannabis isn’t the typical industry origin story. 

She said she joined the US Navy because she “wanted out” after school and figured it was her best shot at getting stationed near the ocean. She served four years in California and Hawaii. And when she got out, she didn’t exactly glide into a cushy, long-term civilian gig.

She bounced through jobs—including the postal service and bartending—before landing in a high-stress role staffing emergency rooms, a job that had her carrying “two pagers and a cell phone strapped to my hip 24/7.” From there, she spent roughly 12 years in pharmaceutical sales and later worked in toxicology. And for this origin story, that last chapter matters the most. 

Shoched said she watched the opioid era up close—how addiction spreads, how the system incentivizes the wrong things, and how quickly patients can get trapped in a cycle of prescriptions. In toxicology, she worked with doctors on compliance programs and said she helped bring down what she described as one of the biggest pill mills in southeast Michigan.

And in those same offices, she kept running into a question that still makes some medical professionals uncomfortable: What about cannabis? Her take was the same then as it is today. If a patient is otherwise compliant, THC shouldn’t be treated like a scandal.

“If they were compliant with their meds, but they popped for THC, leave them alone,” she said.

Not everyone wants to smoke

When Michigan’s medical marijuana program created a legal caregiver model, Shoched took the leap. She started caregiving in 2013 and spent about five years growing cannabis for patients. 

That work put her face-to-face with a simple reality: A lot of patients don’t actually want to smoke. They want the relief of cannabis, but they want it cleaner, easier, and discreet—which was especially the case for people dealing with pain, nausea, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Her patients eventually started making their own oil to get the job done. And at the same time, e-cigarettes were booming, and vape shops were popping up everywhere across the state.

Shoched saw the opening.

“I thought, wow, this is something new emerging in the cannabis industry, vaping cannabis oil,” she recalled. “Let’s do this right. Let’s get good quality hardware.”

Why hardware suddenly mattered

From there, the hardware evolved fast—plastic to glass, wicks to ceramic, distillate to live resin to live rosin. Shoched said O2VAPE adapted alongside those shifts, building the company around four values she often repeats: quality products, customer service, honesty, and integrity.

The turning point for the wider market came in 2019, when vaping-related illnesses and deaths triggered a statewide panic. The culprit, Shoched said, wasn’t legitimate vape hardware. It was black-market oil that had been cut with vitamin E acetate, a substance that’s fine in skincare but not meant to be inhaled. Still, the crisis changed consumer expectations in Michigan. People started asking harder questions about what’s inside the device, including heavy metals.

Shoched said O2VAPE had already been moving in that direction and leaned harder into glass-focused designs as the market shifted. Today, she describes O2VAPE as primarily a wholesale business, often white-labeling hardware for cannabis brands—meaning consumers may never see the O2VAPE name even when they’re using O2VAPE hardware.

Still, in Michigan, the glass tip has become a tell. 

Shoched named Eastside Alchemy and Peninsula Gardens as examples of Michigan brands that use O2VAPE hardware, among other familiar names. That’s the part that fuels her passion: Even if O2VAPE isn’t consumer famous, it’s woven into products people already trust

“People don’t always know it’s us, but they definitely know the glass,” Shoched said. 

Small team, big standards

Shoched says O2VAPE now operates primarily wholesale—about 90% of the business—serving brands with bulk orders and customization. She describes a company that’s “small, but mighty,” with under 20 employees on payroll, and a workplace culture she clearly takes personally. 

She said she covers employee health benefits, offers profit-sharing and a 401(k), and tries to treat the company like a family. “I’m pretty much the mom of everybody here,” she said.

“My goal is to make a real difference for our staff,” Shoched added. “I want my employees to say this was the best job they ever had and that they had the best boss they ever had.”

Shoched’s time in the US Navy also still sits at the center of her business model, how she talks about the company’s mission, and why she’s so vocal about cannabis as a viable alternative to pharmaceuticals for veterans who are dealing with PTSD, chronic pain, and sleep issues.

O2VAPE offers a standing 25% discount for veterans and active-duty service members, a policy Shoched describes as non-negotiable. The company also backs its batteries with a lifetime warranty—less a marketing hook than a reflection of the standards she developed in the military. 

“You will never come out of the military the same,” Shoched said. “It molds you in a way. It makes you very detail-oriented, customer service-focused. I think it makes you a better person.”

The bottom line 

To Shoched, the pitch to brands is straightforward: Hardware isn’t where you cut corners, because it’s the one part of the product that can instantly destroy trust.

“You get one time to launch your brand, so why skimp on the hardware?” she said. 

For consumers, that translates into something more practical. Focusing on quality hardware means the vape you paid good money for doesn’t taste burnt halfway through. It means your fancy live rosin doesn’t come through tasting muted and metallic. It also means your pocket doesn’t suddenly smell like a dispensary because a cart dumped oil into your battery.

Vape hardware isn’t glamorous. It’s not meant to be. But it’s the difference between a clean, terpene-forward hit and a frustrating mess that ends up in the trash.

And in Michigan, a woman-owned, veteran-owned company based in Temperance has quietly become one of the biggest reasons so many people don’t have to think about that at all.

“If you want quality, this is the place to come and always has been since day one.”

READ MORE: 7 quick hits of cannabis news from across Michigan

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