Nicpik has a pretty good service, overall. At $29 a month for five bottles of juice – and a minimum of 60 ml – the price is excellent, and although you’re stuck with whatever they choose for you, the selection process is generally good so it’s not such a huge issue. The main problem for Nicpik is down to the stiff competition they face from similar companies, who offer a more detailed (and personalized) selection of flavors, or put out a similar service for cheaper. Overall, I’d say most vapers would be happy with a Nicpik subscription, but you can probably find a better service overall elsewhere.
Vapers have a lot of choice when it comes to e-liquid subscription services. When the idea was first developed, there were only a few to choose from, but the competition heated up pretty quickly. Florida-based Nicpik got its start in March 2014, offering a fairly stripped-down service designed to help vapers find some new juices they love by providing three to five bottles of e-liquid per month delivered right to your door.
The basic premise is the same as other e-liquid subscription services: you tell them the sort of juices you like, they choose some of the most suitable options from their selection and you receive a delivery to your door each month.
So is Nicpik worth trying out? Do they send out juices you’re bound to love, or is it a lackluster effort that pales in comparison to some of the other subscription services on the market? We’ve tried out a five-bottle box for our Nicpik review to answer these questions.
How Nicpik Works
Nicpik has a pretty simple system: first you either choose a five-bottle or a three-bottle box, and then you’re given a choice between four different types of box depending on your flavor preferences. There’s the Variety Pak, which offers everything but tobacco and menthol, the Fruit Pak, offering just fruit flavors, the Dessert Pak, for just dessert-based juices, and the Ultra Pak, which provides a mix of everything. When you’ve chosen this, you can choose between five nicotine levels: 0, 3, 6, 12 and 18 mg/ml of nicotine.
After you’ve chosen your payment plan, you’re given the option to tell Nicpik which flavors you really like and which ones you want to avoid, so they have enough information to tailor your box to suit your preferences. The fields are open, so you can choose to write in any flavors you like.
You can pay for Nicpik month-to-month, every three months, every six months or just once a year, and the cost reduces the more you pay up-front. For the five-bottle box, the price is $29 per month if you pay monthly, $25 per month if you pay every quarter, $24 per month if you pay every six months and $23 per month if you pay annually, and for the three-bottle box, it’s $22 per month for monthly payments, $20 per month for quarterly payments, $19 per month if you pay every six months and $18 per month if you pay annually.
Why you’d want to pay for a service like this annually is honestly beyond me: if it starts to suck a few months in, what would you do? If you did subscribe to the five-bottle box for a year, you’d save $72 compared to paying monthly, but committing to something like this for a year is a big step.
Your payment comes out when you sign up, and on the same day each month after that, and your bottles are shipped out right away. They ship domestically for free, and international shipping is available for $9.99 to Canada and $14.99 to most other countries. You can cancel your subscription at any time.
Nicpik carries numerous brands, including Cosmic Fog, Cuttwood, Boosted, NicQuid, Charlie Noble, Hurricane Vapor, Boardwalk Vapor, Moon Mountain, Cyber Liquids and many others, although their selection is a little smaller than you’ll find with other subscription services.
The Box: What You Get
The box you receive for Nicpik is fairly basic, a small box with the logo on the front and the web address along one side, filled with shredded, crinkled bits of paper with your bottles nestled inside. You also get a Nicpik card (encouraging you to share pictures of your unboxing on social media) and some stickers for the different brands they carry (even if some of the brands aren’t in your box, as was the case for mine).
This is a standard offering for a subscription service, but it must be said that presentation-wise, other services – Zamplebox and Craft Vapery in particular – do a lot better. It’s not much of an issue, but it does make the experience feel a more mundane, although you still get some of that giddy, kid-on-Christmas feeling as you look through your mystery vape-mail to see what you’ve got.
The Flavors – How Was the Curation?
Although the presentation for Nicpik wasn’t fantastic, the quality of the juices received – and how suitable they were to my tastes – is the most important thing. I told them that I love dessert and bakery-style flavors (mentioning cinnamon roll, berries and cream, cheesecake, banana nut bread) and fruits (particularly tropical ones), and that I’m not huge on tobacco and menthol flavors.
The system is fairly basic – especially in comparison to some of the other services – but I aimed to give them the same information I gave to the other services I tried out (as part of the second Battle of the Boxes post). So what did I get, and what did I think to the juices?
- Banana Cream Pie by Seattle Vapor Co.: This is a dessert-style flavor that immediately ticks a lot of boxes for me. The flavor has been pulled off pretty well – the banana is a little understated, but the cream is well-executed and the overall flavor is definitely pleasant. It’s not a stand-out flavor for me, but I happily made my way through the bottle.
- Point Break by Supremacy Vapors: This is a strawberries and mango juice, again a good choice since I mentioned tropical fruit specifically (and everyone loves strawberries). The flavor itself is pretty good, but also a little disappointing – the individual flavors don’t really pop out, and you’re left with a bit of a generically fruity and slightly sweet mix. It’s not bad, and I wouldn’t fault the overall choice, but I wasn’t too impressed.
- Unicorn Milk by Cuttwood: This is a strawberries and cream juice that’s both incredibly popular and definitively delicious. It’s a great choice for me – again for the fruit and cream combination – and it seems like a pretty safe selection for anyone. The cream is fairly dominant, but the notes of strawberry throughout make this consistently delicious and an all-day vape for me. Definitely my favorite of the bunch.
- Sweet Sunrise by Cyber Liquids: This is a pear, watermelon and apple e-liquid, which is obviously in line with the general “fruits” preference I stated but I would say it comes off as a generic fruity selection rather than feeling particularly tailored to my preferences. The juice is really good, though – all of the elements are detectable and they work together wonderfully. This is one of my favorites from the box.
- Comet by Moon Mountain (Maximum Velocity): This is a cereal juice with milk and berries (Captain Crunch), and another fairly solid choice from Nicpik. The cereal comes through well, with the milk and berries topping the whole thing off nicely and rounding out the flavor, although they’re fairly low in the mix. This is a great selection for my tastes, and I’d put it as my second-favorite from the box.
Overall, Nicpik did a pretty good job with their flavor selection, especially since I enjoyed all of the juices included. The only criticism is that a couple of the juices – mainly Sweet Sunrise but also Point Break to a lesser degree – felt a little generic in terms of the selection, with no real sense that they were specifically chosen for my preferences. That said, given that I did say I like fruity juices it’s not too fair to complain about that.
I would say that Nicpik’s process could be improved by being a bit more in-depth in the early stages of the process. Whereas some subscription services give a long list of potential preferences, Nicpik focuses on some broad categories and then offers some open fields for you to fill in more information. Perhaps if I’d given more information the selections would have felt more tailored, but with little guidance it’s hard to determine what the right amount of information is.