Lio didn't start in a lab. It started in a kitchen in Medemblik, with a 19-year-old who'd watched too many people he loved try — and fail — to quit. This is the long version.
Mees was 19. His dad's friends had tried gum, patches, vapes, hypnosis — the full arsenal of "quitting tools." Most lasted a fortnight. Then the cigarette would come back. Different brand, maybe. Same hand-to-mouth ritual.
That was the part nobody seemed to be solving for. Every cessation product in the EU was trying to wean people off a chemical. None of them were addressing the gesture — the 200 times a day you reach for something to do with your fingers.
So he carved one. A piece of olive wood, a hollow chamber, a single mint core inside. The first version weighed 9 grams and broke if you dropped it. It also worked — for him, then for three friends, then for forty people on a Reddit thread. That was the moment Lio stopped being a sketch.
Every peer-reviewed study we could find on smoking behaviour pointed at the same thing. The chemistry is real. The ritual is bigger.
The reach. The flick. The breath. The break. The way your hand knows what to do before your brain catches up.
Real, but treatable. Patches, gum, and abstinence handle this part — and have handled it well for fifty years.
From a single hand-turned prototype to 150,000+ customers across 28 countries — without venture capital, without paid PR, without ever calling Lio a medical device.
Mees turns the first olive-wood diffuser by hand. Sends three to friends who've tried to quit. Two say it actually helps. The third loses theirs in a club.
A post in r/stopsmoking explaining the "behavioural-not-chemical" thesis goes mildly viral. Two hundred strangers wire €29 in a single weekend. The order book is now bigger than the inventory.
Martin van Lier — Mees's father — turns over part of his Zwaag warehouse to ship Lio across the EU. What started as a favour becomes the entire European supply chain.
Minty Magic, Peppery Mint, Cinnamon Spice, Razzy Berry, Mango Passion, Ohh My Orange. No nicotine. No combustion. No medical claim. Just six botanical formulas a habit can latch onto.
Dutch consumer watchdog Tros Radar puts the cessation category under a microscope. We rewrite every product page. We strip every "stop smoking" claim. We commit, on the record, to positioning Lio as a ritual replacement — not a medical device.
The disposable-vape ban hits the UK. Within ten weeks Lio is the fastest-growing nicotine-free ritual brand in Britain — entirely from word-of-mouth and creator content.
We launch the subscription. Belgian tobacconists start carrying Lio on the counter. The team is twelve people across Bali, Dubai, Amsterdam, and Zwaag. We still answer every email ourselves.
In late 2024, the Dutch consumer watchdog Tros Radar turned its lens on the entire smoking-cessation category. Half the brands they reviewed were quietly making medical claims they couldn't back. We weren't named — but we were close enough to notice.
So we did the thing most brands don't. We rewrote the website. We pulled every "quit smoking" line. We sat down with a regulatory consultant and reframed Lio from the ground up — not as a cessation device, but as what it actually is: a ritual replacement tool. A way to keep the gesture, without the chemistry.
It cost us six weeks of revenue and probably half of our paid-ads efficiency for a quarter. It was also the moment Lio became a brand we're proud of, instead of a brand that was getting away with something.
Lio is a wooden mouth diffuser with nicotine-free botanical cores. We make no medical claim. We don't promise you'll quit. We promise you a ritual you can keep — and customers do the rest.
Four time zones, one supply chain, twelve humans, and an HQ that doubles as Mees's piano room.
Mees runs strategy, brand, and product from a co-working space in Canggu. Most of the team's standups happen at 3pm WITA — early morning in Europe.
Fresh@Work BV, run by Mees's father Martin, ships every EU and UK order from a 2,400m² warehouse in Noord-Holland.
VanLierGroup FZCO is the parent operating company. Founded 2023. One shareholder. No outside investors.
The smallest possible team that can ship to 28 countries — and answer your emails the same day.
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The founder's note is three paragraphs long. It's the speech Mees gives when someone asks, at a dinner table, what Lio actually is. Read it next.
Read the founder note →