About us
A small company with a long attention span
Meridia is made by Grove Online Store LTD, registered in Birmingham on 5 November 2023 and run by its director, Percival Whitlock. We sell one product, on purpose.
The company
One band, chosen deliberately
The wearable market rewards novelty: a new model every autumn, a new subscription every spring. We decided to do the opposite. Grove Online Store LTD exists to sell, support and steadily improve a single band — Meridia One — so that every hour of engineering, every support conversation and every return teaches us about the same nineteen grams of hardware.
The company was registered in England in late 2023, after fourteen months of informal field work that began on a delayed ferry crossing, where our founder watched a friend juggle three health apps and still miss the obvious signal: he was exhausted, and his numbers had been saying so for days. The question that founded the company was written on the back of a boarding card that day — "what would a calm, honest readout look like?" — and it is still the first line of our design brief.
Today the team is deliberately small: product and firmware engineers, one sleep researcher on a part-time contract, and a support desk in Birmingham that answers seven days a week. We do not run a call centre abroad and we do not outsource repairs; when something goes wrong, the person answering is the person who can fix it.
The product
What Meridia One is, in plain words
Meridia One is an activity and recovery band. It watches sleep phases, heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, skin-temperature drift and daily strain, and condenses them into a short morning brief. It is not a medical device and makes no medical claims; it is a well-made mirror for your own patterns.
The hardware choices follow from that brief. A 16-day battery means the band spends its nights on your wrist, not its days on a charger — recovery tracking only works when the device is actually worn. Five ATM water resistance, tested to ISO 22810:2010, means showers, swims and rain are simply not events. Nineteen grams means you forget it, which is the entire point. UKCA and CE marking, with compliance to the Radio Equipment Regulations 2017, means the unit you buy is the unit that was tested.
And because trust is a feature, the commercial choices follow too: no subscription, no locked metrics, no sale of personal data, CSV export of your full history, and a 30-day wear-it-anywhere trial with a full refund. If the band is not useful, we would rather refund you quickly and learn why.
Principles
The four lines we do not cross
Calm over streaks
No guilt mechanics, no broken streaks, no confetti. The brief informs; it never punishes. A bad night is data, not a moral failure.
Your data is yours
Full CSV export, no data selling, no subscription hostage-taking. History belongs to the wrist that produced it.
Repair before replace
Straps, buckles and cables are sold at cost and designed to be swapped at a kitchen table, not by a lab.
Honest claims
We publish what the sensors estimate and what they cannot. Where a laboratory would disagree with a wrist, we say so.
The field programme
Tested where itineraries are real
Before release, Meridia One spent fourteen months with 212 testers across nine time zones: sailors, summit guides, deal lawyers, cabin crew and one particularly patient retired lighthouse keeper. Every tester kept a paper diary alongside the data, because the gap between what a sensor reports and what a human feels is where the honest engineering happens.
That programme retired 38 prototypes. It moved the temperature sensor two millimetres, redrew the strap buckle after a jetty ladder incident, and produced the battery protocol we still use: real days with real flights, not laboratory loops. When you read a number on this site — 16 days, 5 ATM, 19 grams — it has a diary entry behind it.
We remain a one-product company for the foreseeable future. The roadmap is depth, not width: better baselines, better briefs, and straps in materials we are proud of. If we ever make a second product, it will have earned it the way the first one did — fourteen months of field notes first.