Founder Story

The Manchester student who built a simple device to help thousands of Brits quit vaping

After five years of vaping and countless failed attempts to stop, Sophie Bennett realised the hardest part of quitting had nothing to do with nicotine. So she built something for the part everyone else ignored.

For most of her early twenties, Sophie Bennett did what millions of young Britons do without thinking twice — she reached for a vape. It started at eighteen and quietly became part of every hour of her day: the walk to lectures, the gap between seminars, the moment her laptop loaded, the second she stepped outside. Five years in, she wasn't even chasing a buzz anymore. She just couldn't stop reaching.

What unsettled her most wasn't her own habit. It was watching everyone around her try to quit — and fail in almost identical ways.

Flatmates who rattled through a full pack of Tic Tacs in an afternoon. Friends who chewed gum until their jaws ached, getting through packet after packet. One housemate who took to sucking air through an empty straw at her desk, again and again, because her hand simply expected something to do. Others rotated through every product the shop sold: nicotine pouches, zyns, gum, 0-nicotine "zero" vapes that mimicked the device without the chemical.

None of it worked. They'd last a few days, sometimes a week, then drift back. And the pattern bothered Bennett enough that, in her final year studying at Manchester Metropolitan University, she started reading into why.

The discovery that changed her approach

What she found in the research surprised her. Nicotine — the thing everyone blames — clears the body remarkably fast. Most studies put it at roughly four days before it's physically gone from your system.

So if the chemical leaves in under a week, why does quitting take most people months, or never happen at all?

The answer wasn't chemical. It was behavioural — the ritual, the hand-to-mouth gesture, the hundreds of tiny daily motions the body had memorised.

That, Bennett realised, was the gap nobody was designing for. Patches and gum throw more nicotine at a problem that's barely about nicotine after the first few days. They do nothing for the ritual — the reach, the lift to the face, the inhale, the flavour, the small pause that punctuates the day. Her friends weren't relapsing because they craved a chemical. They were relapsing because their hands and mouths were bored and lost.

So she set out to build something for the ritual itself.

A simple stick, designed to fool the brain

The product she eventually landed on is almost comically simple: a small nasal stick, no bigger than a lip balm, filled with essential oils that carry familiar, vape-like flavours. You bring it up to your nose and inhale. That's it. No nicotine, no battery, no vapour.

But the simplicity hides a deliberate piece of design. Bennett built the stick to satisfy each of the things her research told her actually keep people hooked:

• 1 It replaces the flavour The essential oils recreate the sweet, fruity hit a vape delivers. To the brain, the flavour signal that came to mean "vape" now comes from the stick instead — the reward arrives without the device.
• 2 It satisfies the hand-to-mouth gesture Lifting the stick to your face mirrors the exact motion of vaping. That repeated reach — the part gum and pouches never address — finally has somewhere to go.
• 3 It delivers a throat hit on the inhale Because the nose and throat are connected, inhaling the oils produces a cooling sensation at the back of the throat — the "hit" smokers and vapers describe missing most when they stop.

The idea is to give the brain everything it associates with vaping — the flavour, the gesture, the sensation — minus the thing doing the harm. The craving gets answered while the habit, starved of the device, quietly fades.

"You're not fighting the urge. You're giving it somewhere harmless to land until it stops showing up." — a description Bennett has used of how the stick works

Sold out almost immediately

Bennett manufactured the sticks in the UK and put a small first batch online under the name HiSticks, expecting it to trickle out slowly. It sold out within days.

Word moved quickly through the same student and ex-vaper circles that had inspired it. People who'd cycled through gum, pouches and zero-nicotine vapes found that the one thing they'd never tried — addressing the ritual head-on — was the thing that finally let them put the vape down. Since that first drop, the brand says it has helped thousands of people across the UK stop vaping, many reporting they were off it within about two weeks.

For a product that began as a final-year side project, built to solve a problem its creator watched wreck her friends' attempts to quit, the trajectory has been steep — and supply has struggled to keep up ever since.