My Big Idea: MEAVO acoustic phone booths and meeting pods

‍Hi Todor! What's your elevator pitch?

MEAVO makes acoustic phone booths and meeting pods for open-plan offices. Think of them as a private room you can put anywhere — certified noise reduction, delivered and installed by our team, plugged into a standard socket, and ready in one afternoon.

We started in 2018 because the booths on the market were too expensive and inaccessible. We built an affordable and direct to market option. Today we're in offices from Google and Barclays to two-person startups, across all of Europe and the US.

Why does the market need it?

The open-plan office was sold to us as a collaboration engine. In practice, it created a permanent shortage of quiet. Everyone has been on a call in a stairwell. Everyone has watched a colleague hijack an eight-person boardroom for a one-person Zoom.

The furniture industry's answer was a premium product with a huge designer markup, only accessible through resellers and not directly from the manufacturers. In contrast, we manufacture in the EU, hold stock in local warehouses, and get a booth into your office in the same week rather than three months. Great acoustics, industry leading certifications, no nonsense process. It also happens to be an incredibly sustainable option — each booth contains over 800 recycled plastic bottles, and we hold an EcoVadis Gold rating that puts us in the top 5% of companies assessed.

Where is the business today?

We're a team of 60, fully remote, selling across Europe and North America. Showrooms in London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Zurich, Vienna and Brussels. Most of them are hosted inside partner workspaces, which keeps our overheads honest. We have invested in our own manufacturing facility in order to accelerate and improve our R&D and better control the quality of our products. 

Our product range has grown too: we have the Soho for solo calls, the Workstation for longer focus sessions, and the Camden in two- and four-person configurations. This year still, we will release our next generation products - the Haven Line - that offer more natural light, better sound insulation and premium looks.

What made you think there was money in this?

In all honesty: we were sitting in our noisy London coworking space at the time, watching people queue for that one quiet corner, and just thought how hard can it be?

Reasonably hard, it turns out. But the market research was sitting right in front of us; every open-plan office we walked into had the same problem and the same non-solution. We called the incumbents, got quoted three times what we expected and a twelve-week lead time, and realised the gap wasn't in the product, but in the price and the promise.

After that, we spent months prototyping before we had anything we'd put our name on. The first booth was built in 2017, but we didn't launch commercially until 2018.

As for competitors, the premium end of the market makes genuinely excellent products, and they've done the hard work of teaching the world what a phone booth is. Their weakness isn't quality, it's accessibility: long lead times, high prices, and a sales process built for a 5,000-person headquarters, rather than a 60-person scale-up. They sell only through resellers, architects and design studios. At the budget end, even if the products are somehow not terrible, the customer service usually is lacking due to untrained assembly staff, slow after sales service and lacking warranty. 

What's your biggest strength?

I would say customer service and certifications. We have local teams in all of our big markets, who are just a phone call away. We can deliver, assemble and service your booths quickly and reliably.

In terms of certifications, we're one of the few manufacturers tested to the actual acoustics standard for enclosures (ISO 23351-1:2020). Our booths and our factory are tested by TÜV-SÜD, our wood is FSC certified, and our management systems also carry several ISO certifications. We also hold an EcoVadis Gold medal for sustainability, putting us in the top 5% of companies assessed.

The other strength is choice without cost. We offer thousands of colour options so our clients can make the booths truly their own. Most of the industry treats customisation as an afterthought, but we choose to treat it as the default.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Sell the outcome, not the object. Nobody wakes up wanting to buy a box. They want to stop losing an hour a day to noise, or they want their fit-out to land on schedule. Once we started leading with that, the conversations got shorter and the deals got bigger.

The main challenge has been the one every physical-product founder underestimates: the gap between a great prototype and a great supply chain. Software lets you ship a fix on Tuesday, but furniture doesn't. Our answer was to iterate relentlessly anyway — our booths get a new feature or improvement roughly every two months — and to hold stock close to the customer rather than shipping from the factory every time. That's the single decision that unlocked our lead times, and it costs us working capital every day. It was totally worth it.

The advice I'd pass on: if your differentiator is speed, you have to pay for it somewhere on the balance sheet. Decide early whether you're willing to.

How do you market the company?

There are three channels that have driven our growth.

The biggest has been search and content. Nobody wakes up wanting a phone booth. They start looking when noise becomes a problem. We've invested heavily in being the answer to that search, in multiple languages. So we bet a lot on SEO, and more recently on GEO.

The second is showrooms in partner coworking spaces. A booth is difficult to sell through a photograph but easy to sell after 30 seconds inside one. By placing showrooms in shared workspaces, we've built a presence in ten cities without taking on ten leases. 

The third is the architect channel. It takes longer to build, but once a product is specified, it gets repeated across projects. We support architects with CAD/BIM files and sustainability credentials they can include straight in their submissions, making the process as easy as possible.

The biggest lesson - understand whether your customers are actively searching for a solution or need to be sold one. Ours were already searching, and that single insight completely changed where we invested our budget.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We've built MEAVO without institutional funding. Thomas, my co-founder, and I, were adamant from the beginning that we wanted to build this sustainably and without external capital. We bootstrapped the whole thing. 

The model is straightforward: we design and manufacture in the EU, sell direct to end users and through design & build partners. We try to source locally where possible. Unit economics work because we don't carry a designer markup or a showroom estate. 

So far, we’ve done well, and as such our resolve and vision is to remain bootstrapped for the foreseeable future.

What were you doing before?

I spent most of my career in digital marketing — PPC Director for Europe at Ogilvy, then Chief Marketing Officer at JOB TODAY, a high-growth recruitment app. Before that I co-founded a small social media agency in Europe. I have an MSc from Bayes Business School in London and a BSc from the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Going from SaaS to physical goods was a humbling education in supply chain management and manufacturing. 

What is the future vision?

The office isn't disappearing, it's being asked to do more. It has to justify the commute, host hybrid teams, and flex between focus and collaboration on the same floor plate — usually without getting any bigger.

We want to be the default answer to that. Not just booths: a modular acoustic system that lets any company reconfigure its space in an afternoon rather than a renovation cycle, at a price a 60-person business can actually sign off on.

And we want to keep proving that sustainable and affordable aren't opposites. Every booth already keeps 800 bottles out of landfill and funds trees in Madagascar and solar lamps in Zambia. That's our commitment and we believe it should be table stakes for the whole industry.

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