Meet the Incredible RELX Lineup – Your Best First Vape Brand

RELX Today: A Brand Still in Motion


What’s New with RELX

RELX has changed considerably since it began operations in January 2018, evolving from a young Chinese e-vapor company focused primarily on closed-system pod devices into a much broader product brand with pod systems, disposable devices, and multiple generations of hardware designed for different consumer preferences, while continuing to build recognition around the RELX name across an increasingly competitive international market.

What makes RELX particularly interesting today is not simply the number of products carrying its logo, but the way its earlier success created a foundation for continued product expansion: once a brand has established familiarity with its hardware design, pod ecosystem, distribution network, and overall user experience, launching another device becomes less about introducing an unknown name and more about giving existing consumers another reason to stay within an ecosystem they already understand.


RELX creator pro vape device relx blog 11(2)

From a Vape Brand to a Global Name

The speed of RELX’s early growth remains one of the most striking parts of its story. According to the company’s SEC filings, RELX generated approximately RMB 132.6 million in net revenue in 2018, its first year of operations, before revenue increased to approximately RMB 1.55 billion in 2019 and RMB 3.82 billion in 2020, eventually reaching approximately RMB 8.52 billion in 2021.

The scale of that expansion was reflected not only in revenue but also in distribution and product shipments; by 2021, RELX reported more than 200 authorized distributors, alongside shipments of approximately 19.5 million rechargeable devices and 505.5 million cartridges, illustrating how quickly the company had moved from a newly established brand into a large-scale consumer hardware business.

8.52 B
RMB NET REVENUE
2021
62.6 %
CLOSED-SYSTEM MARKET SHARE
Q1–Q3 2020
505.5
MILLION CARTRIDGES SHIPPED
2021

For a consumer brand, however, scale alone does not automatically create loyalty. RELX’s ability to maintain a recognizable product language, build a dedicated ecosystem around its devices and cartridges, and expand its lineup without abandoning the familiarity of the brand helped create something particularly valuable in a hardware category where consumers often care about consistency: the confidence of knowing what they are buying before they open the box.


The Story Behind RELX


Born in 2018

RELX officially commenced operations on January 2, 2018. From the beginning, the company described its ambition in broader terms than simply selling devices. Its stated mission was to build RELX as a trusted brand through products, technology, and scientific advances.

But the story actually began a little earlier. In 2017, RELX co-founder and CEO Kate Wang came into contact with FEELM‘s newly patented ceramic coil technology. According to FEELM’s account of the partnership, Wang was impressed by the smooth taste and performance of the technology — a meeting that would become an important starting point for the relationship between the two companies.

From Newcomer to Market Leader

RELX’s rise was particularly remarkable because it happened within a very short period of time. Its prospectus, citing research from China Insights Consultancy, reported that RELX held 48.0% of China’s closed-system e-vapor market by retail sales value in 2019, and that share had increased to 62.6% during the first nine months of 2020, placing the company at the center of one of the fastest-growing segments of China’s e-vapor market at the time.

That position helps explain why RELX developed a stable audience so quickly: consumers were not only encountering the brand through individual products, but through an increasingly visible retail and distribution network, while the company’s expanding range of devices and cartridges gave existing users more opportunities to remain within the same product ecosystem rather than switching completely to another brand.

In other words, RELX’s early advantage was not created by one successful device alone; it was reinforced by availability, familiarity, product continuity, and the perception that the brand would still be around when consumers needed their next device or cartridge.


Meet the Lineup


Four Devices, Four Takes on the RELX Experience

The best way to understand how far RELX’s product strategy has evolved is to look at the lineup itself, where different generations and formats now sit under the same brand umbrella, ranging from the compact and familiar pod-oriented experience associated with RELX’s earlier products to newer high-capacity devices designed around longer usage, larger batteries, and increasingly distinctive industrial designs.




Step Into RELX



Rather than presenting these products as four unrelated devices, the lineup can be viewed as four different interpretations of the same brand identity, showing how RELX has continued to expand into new product formats while retaining the visual recognition and familiarity that helped establish the brand in the first place.


The Technology Behind the Experience


The Ceramic Atomization Story

One of the most important technical chapters in RELX’s early development began before the company itself officially started operating, when it became connected with FEELM’s ceramic atomization technology in 2017; FEELM’s official account describes its early ceramic coil as a technology based on a ceramic structure with a metal heating film, offering a fundamentally different approach from the conventional coil-and-wick systems that had dominated earlier generations of e-cigarette hardware.

RELX subsequently adopted FEELM’s ceramic atomization technology in its early products, including the RELX Classic, making the technology an important part of the brand’s early hardware story; the significance was not simply that the product used a ceramic component, but that RELX and its technology partner continued to refine the structure, manufacturing process, and production system as the products moved from an early concept toward large-scale commercial manufacturing.

This distinction is worth making clear: RELX did not invent ceramic atomization technology itself. Its early development was closely connected with FEELM’s technology and the partnership between the two companies.


A worker at RELX’s manufacturing facility examines the filled e-liquid pods.

From Hardware to Research

As the company expanded, RELX increasingly presented itself as more than a hardware and consumer brand, investing in internal research capabilities that included the RELX Physiochemistry Lab, which focused on areas including e-liquid and aerosol research, and the RELX Bioscience Lab, reflecting the company’s broader attempt to establish scientific and technical infrastructure alongside its commercial product development.

This progression is important to the story of brand trust because consumers rarely see the research, testing, engineering, and manufacturing systems behind a finished device, yet those less visible parts of a company are often what determine whether a product can deliver a reasonably consistent experience at scale; for RELX, the development of dedicated research capabilities represented an attempt to move from simply producing successful devices toward building a more systematic product-development process.


What People Are Saying About RELX


“Beyond the Marketing”


RELX’s own materials can explain when the company was founded, how its products evolved, and how large its business became, but understanding why the brand continues to attract attention requires looking beyond corporate messaging and examining independent reviews, hands-on testing, and long-term user discussions, where recurring comments about industrial design, draw characteristics, flavor delivery, battery performance, cartridge compatibility, and everyday usability can provide a different perspective from the company’s own product descriptions.

For a brand that has been in the market since 2018, this outside perspective is particularly useful because trust is rarely established by a single advertising campaign; it tends to accumulate through repeated interactions between a product and its users, through recommendations, reviews, availability, familiar design language, and the simple fact that consumers can find the same brand again when they decide to purchase another device.

“A Brand Worth Watching”


RELX’s story is therefore less about a single breakthrough product and more about how several pieces came together at the right time: a company that began operations in 2018, an early technological partnership with FEELM, rapid expansion in China’s closed-system e-vapor market, a growing distribution network, continued investment in research, and an increasingly diverse product lineup that allowed the brand to remain relevant as consumer preferences and hardware formats changed.

Its stable audience was not built overnight, nor can it be explained by one technology or one marketing campaign; it was built through recognition, consistency, availability, product evolution, and years of accumulated familiarity, turning RELX from a newcomer in 2018 into a name that millions of consumers had encountered by the time the company reached its rapid-growth years.

And that may be the most interesting part of the RELX story: the lineup keeps changing, but the name remains familiar.




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