Vaponaute, a profile of the Parisian vaping brand
Few vaping brands have built a world rather than a catalogue. Vaponaute is one of them, with a fixation on aviation, travel and a distinctly Parisian sense of style. Thirteen years after it was founded, the brand has nonetheless changed owner, packaging and even the names of its e-liquids. What is left of its original identity, and what does its story say about the way French vaping grew up?
Who is Vaponaute?
Vaponaute is a French e-liquid and vaping hardware brand, founded in Paris in 2013 by Anne-Claire d’Izarny-Gargas and her partner Léopold. It describes itself as the first luxury e-liquid and e-cigarette brand created in France, a claim that remains the brand’s own. Since March 2018 it has belonged to Gaïatrend, the French group behind Alfaliquid, which now produces its liquids. Its signature fits in a single word, aviation, which runs through its range names, its hardware and its vocabulary.
Voluptuous and refined, the founders’ idea of vaping
From the start, the house set out a new approach to vaping that it wanted to be voluptuous and refined. In 2014, when the brand had just released its fourth creation, the French trade press was already calling it the house with the aviator mask, built around the idea of the e-voyage, with bottles presented in a small linen basket.
That care for the object was a positioning choice. Where many e-liquid makers lead with recipes, Vaponaute leads with a world of its own, and treats the bottle, the box and the name of each reference as parts of a single story.
The E-voyages collection, five flavours according to the group, carries that idea straight through. The brand pitches it as an invitation to travel through the senses, aimed at experienced vapers looking for complex recipes, and the catalogue reads more like a logbook than a list of flavours.
Aviation as the Vaponaute grammar
Aviation is not decoration added after the fact, it is the template for the whole brand. The Aces collection, built around classic tobacco-style flavours, is presented as a tribute to the pioneers of flight, the men and women whose exploits put them in the history books.
The hardware follows the same logic. The group describes this side of the catalogue as aircraft and spare parts, and aims its mods and atomisers at experienced vapers, with Teflon drip tips to complete the offer. If terms such as mod, atomiser or drip tip still feel vague, our vape glossary explains them one by one.
The common thread of that hardware is called La Petite Box, an electronic mod reissued in 2022 as the VB22, then extended in 2026 by the VB26 kit. According to its official product sheet, the VB26 takes its lines from an aircraft fuselage and comes in Gunmetal or Silver finishes, in zinc alloy.
More than a decade after its launch, the brand still draws its mods like pieces of an airframe, with lines, curves and dots that point to aeronautics rather than to consumer electronics.
A small house that released very little
The second trait of the brand is a deliberate scarcity. In 2018 its founder announced a pace of three to four e-liquids and two pieces of hardware a year, with the stated aim of keeping Vaponaute exclusive.
That slow tempo went hand in hand with selective, tightly controlled distribution, presented as a founding principle. The company behind the brand, Vape Rituals, then had four employees and exported to eighteen countries, according to the figures published when it was sold.
That niche strategy explains a paradox. Very popular with the most knowledgeable vapers, the brand stayed small in volume, a long way from the ranges designed for a first purchase.
2018, Vaponaute joins Gaïatrend
In March 2018 Gaïatrend announced it was buying Vape Rituals, and with it Vaponaute. In an interview given to the trade press a few months later, the founder explained that she had been looking for a stronger structure for production and sales support, after the upheaval of the TPD, the European Tobacco Products Directive.
The division of roles was clear. Anne-Claire d’Izarny-Gargas and Léopold stayed in charge of creation (flavours, hardware, packaging) and of the brand image, while the group brought its sales force and in-house e-liquid production.
Today the liquids are made in France, at the group’s production site in Grand Est, with a batch number on every bottle for traceability. French know-how, which the founder described as part of the brand’s DNA, has changed address without changing country.
The Vaponaute range relaunch, read from the UK
The most visible change is recent. Recipes and packaging have been overhauled, and the range is now organised into three families, Vaponaute Classics, Vaponaute Fruity and Vaponaute Desserts.
The formats follow a different logic too. The relaunched e-liquids come nicotine-free, 50 ml in a 70 ml bottle or 100 ml in a 125 ml bottle, with room left to add a base or a nic shot, at a 50/50 PG to VG ratio on the product sheets we checked. British vapers will recognise the shortfill format. There are also 30 ml flavour concentrates for DIY.
The names tell the story best. Where the Aces carry names such as Lady Lindy, Sweet Arrow or Silver Stork, the relaunch favours descriptive labels like Toasted Almond Classic, Coffee Classic or Mint Fusion, which put the ingredient before the story. The historic collections are still listed by the group.
The hardware moved with it through the VB26 kit, which pairs a mod running on an external 18650 battery at up to 80 W with a 4 ml VT26 tank that takes Innokin PZP Max coils. The two coils supplied, rated at 0.4 and 0.2 ohm, push it towards an airy draw, the style our comparison of MTL and DTL sets out in detail.
Read from Britain, that specification needs one caveat. A 4 ml tank sits above the 2 ml ceiling that UK rules set for refillable tanks, and nicotine e-liquid is capped at 20 mg/ml in bottles of no more than 10 ml, which is exactly why the shortfill format exists.
What Vaponaute says about French vaping
The brand’s journey condenses a wider shift. An independent creation, born of a Paris couple with a passion for the hobby, joins a large French manufacturer and moves from a handful of references a year to a range organised by flavour family.
What the house kept says the most. The refusal to follow trends at any cost, which the founder listed among the values she shared with the buyer, still shows in hardware drawn like a piece of aviation rather than a generic device.
That is probably where Vaponaute adds something to vaping culture. It is a reminder that an e-cigarette can be a matter of design and storytelling, not only of specifications, in the same way that scenes such as cloud chasing turned the vapour itself into a form of expression.
FAQ
A few questions come up again and again about the brand, its name, its formats and its hardware. The answers below draw on what the brand and its parent group have published.
What does the name Vaponaute mean?
The word joins vapo, short for vapour, to the suffix -naute, the French ending shared by aéronaute and astronaute, the aeronaut and the astronaut. That construction fits the imagery of travel and flight the brand has cultivated since it was founded.
What is Vape Rituals?
It was the company behind Vaponaute in its early years, set up the same year as the brand. The name also serves as the banner for a creative lab run by the same founders, which produced the Barakka collection.
Do Vaponaute e-liquids come with nicotine?
The relaunched liquids are sold nicotine-free in large bottles. The Aces collection comes in 10 ml bottles from 0 to 16 mg/ml of nicotine, a range that sits within the UK cap of 20 mg/ml.
Can Vaponaute concentrates be vaped neat?
No. The 30 ml concentrates are made for DIY and have to be diluted in a neutral base, with or without nicotine, before they are vaped.
Is the VB26 kit a good first device?
It is aimed at someone who already knows their way around a mod. It runs on an external 18650 battery that has to be handled and charged with care, and the group pitches its hardware at experienced vapers.
Vaponaute and a Parisian idea of vaping
From a small Paris outfit to the catalogue of a major manufacturer, the brand has changed scale without giving up its aviator’s vocabulary. The names of its liquids have changed, and so have its formats, but its hardware still tells the same story of a journey.
For anyone interested in vaping culture, Vaponaute remains a textbook case of a brand that chose to treat the e-cigarette as an object of style and storytelling. Its history is a reminder that French vaping was also shaped by its creators, and not only by its spec sheets.
Editorial content for adult readers only. Nicotine vaping products are not for sale to anyone under 18 in the UK, and nicotine is a highly addictive substance. This article is not a buying recommendation.
