Our Mission Statement
We believe that empowerment comes through awareness and awareness
comes through hearing all sides of the argument, both negative and positive.
The Quitober Challenges is a positive awareness campaign month that empowers smokers to quit in the workplace.

The Inspiration
With all the negative publicity in the media about bans and restrictions on smokers
we thought it might be time to offer smokers a more positive and supportive approach to quitting. Campaign-months like Movember, Dryjuly and Febfast inspired me along with quit smoking challenges run in Ontario and Quebec, Canada with 46,000 smoking members in 2010. The Quitober Challenge is a mashup of all of these movements. (However this campaign is not a fund raising event with the focus solely on helping smokers to quit.)

Together We Quit & Win...
By creating a groundswell of smokers quitting together we are tapping into the same social forces that got them started in the first place. >>social proof
Having no ties with Quitlines, governments and pharmaceutical companies we can be straight with smokers. ie. Most ex-smokers quit unassisted without counselling or nicotine replacements. All they need is awareness, the desire and a date. >>more on unassisted cessation.

Our Successful Quitober 2010 Pilot
We ran a successful pilot in October this year with 11 Australian universities and organisation including the Uni of Sydney, Australian National University, Monash Uni, Uni of South Australia etc. and the Hume City Council. 69 staff smokers participated in the trial and 27 (39%) managed to quit for the month.

Our Team

Desmond Sherlock is trained as an industrial designer, entrepreneur and philosopher.
He has founded a number of online start-ups. His philosophy is that design is as much about helping people quit smoking as it is about creating a better egg slicer. Des is founder & CEO of the Quitober.

Cassius Cheong - Author of Positively Quit Manual - Quitober Edition :
Cassius wrote the original Positively Quit Manual in 2004.  It all started five years earlier in 1999, when his first child was born.  He attempted to stop smoking several times that year.  As much as he tried, he just couldn’t bring himself to quit - even for a day!  After much research about smoking and addiction, he finally stopped for good in April 2004,
20 years after starting.  This time, he found quitting relatively undemanding. 

Later that year, he put together what he’d learned into Positively Quit, so that other smokers wanting to stop could benefit from his experience.  The current edition of the Positively Quit Manual is available on Amazon.com, where it is receiving many positive reviews.

Cassius used to do marketing and advertising research at two of the best advertising agencies in the world (as voted by Advertising Age).  He now does marketing and business research independently.  In his free time, he loves having a good red, practices JKD and helps smokers stop smoking.