Brand Story · Founded 2000 · Tuttlingen, Germany

Storz & Bickel

The German engineers who built the Volcano in 2000 and have been the benchmark for vapor quality ever since. Twenty-five years of medical-grade precision in every device.

"We started with one goal: build a vaporizer precise enough to use in a medical setting. Everything else followed from that."

— Markus Storz, co-founder

The Origin — A German Garage, 2000

Storz & Bickel was founded in 2000 by Markus Storz and Jürgen Bickel in Tuttlingen, Germany — a small town known globally as the center of Germany's precision medical instrument manufacturing industry. That location wasn't accidental. From day one, S&B built to medical tolerances, not consumer electronics tolerances. The original Volcano Classic launched that same year and immediately set a benchmark the rest of the industry has spent 25 years trying to reach.

Markus Storz, the engineer behind the product, designed the Volcano's convection heating system from scratch. The core insight was simple but radical: hot air moving through herb is cleaner, more consistent, and more efficient than direct contact between a heating element and the material. That principle — pure convection — became the foundation of every S&B product that followed. Twenty-five years later, it's still the principle that makes their vapor quality unmatched.

In 2009, their devices received certification as medical products in Canada — one of the first vaporizers in the world to achieve that distinction. This wasn't marketing. S&B devices were prescribed by doctors and dispensed through pharmacies. The medical-grade standard was baked into their engineering from the beginning, not retrofitted for compliance.

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The Philosophy — Build Once, Use Forever

S&B's engineering philosophy is the opposite of planned obsolescence. Units from 2003 post regularly on forums with zero issues. Replacement parts for the original Volcano Classic are still manufactured and available today. The company treats repairability as a design requirement, not an afterthought. Every S&B product ships with a 3-year warranty, backed by a German company that has been standing behind its hardware for a quarter century.

When S&B expanded beyond the Volcano — the Plenty desktop wand in 2009, the Crafty portable in 2014, the Mighty in 2014, the Venty in 2023 — each product inherited the same core standards: German manufacturing, medical-grade components, pure convection or hybrid heating, and a warranty that means something. No S&B product has ever been rushed to market or cheapened to hit a price point.

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Where They Are Now

In 2019, Canopy Growth Corporation (a major Canadian cannabis company) acquired Storz & Bickel for approximately $145M CAD. The acquisition raised concerns in the community about quality control, but S&B has operated with full independence and maintained its standards. The Venty, launched in 2023, is arguably the most advanced portable S&B has ever built — faster heat-up, better low-temp flavor, and dual convection. The German team is still running the engineering. The quality hasn't moved.