Juul the brand does not want to market to kids because laws, FDA, etc. Some incompetent VP of marketing wanted to quickly boost numbers, ethics be damned.
I don't mean to stick up for Juul, but it's not out of the realm of possibility considering how incompetent the company sounds from the above.
If I had to guess it would have been some nebulous 'youth prevention' team thinking it was wise to go into schools and explain why cigarettes were bad and vaping wasn't encouraged yada yada.
Inexcusable but Juul was a quintessential "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" company. (I don't expect people to believe me on that.)
Now I am waiting for the conspiracy theorists to twist your words and imply that you must be a company shill.
Or to tell you how evil you were working, and how they only produce using ethically sourced curly braces, with fairtrade electricity, an organic compiler, on their own hand-carved recyclable wooden laptop.
and that for the execs and the likes means "never do malice as malice, do it under the guise of stupidity". The VW diesel-gate comes to mind - they skillfully spun it like it wasn't VW malice as a company, and instead like it was some rogue employees.
May be you believe that you're saying. Yet giving the MBA types in charge of the company, my bet would be that they intentionally targeted youth while blaming it on whatever incompetence and chaos you're describing.