We are Pion.

At Pion, we help brands harness the growth-driving power of consumer groups with full-funnel insights, advertising and verification. Our ecosystem of solutions helps expand your brand’s customer base and supercharge sales.

About Pion

Your ticket to next-level growth

Since 2005, we’ve uniquely built our expertise to help brands better understand, engage and grow loyalty with students, Gen Z, and other strategic consumer groups. We combine insights, advertising and verification across a range of strategic consumer groups to accelerate your growth on campus, in-store and online.

Understand, engage and grow with a single partner. You’re in good company. We’re trusted by over 1,000 brands in more than 100 countries.

3,500+

brands work with Pion

100+

countries we're active

Our story

2005

We were founded way back in 2005 in Birmingham, UK, by brothers James and Mike Eder. Kickstarting life as Student Beans, we invented digital student discounts and have been pioneering student, youth and Gen Z advertising ever since.
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*fun fact* Initially our student offers focused on local, printable vouchers for businesses in Birmingham.

2006

Student Beans expanded into 18 cities across the UK.*fun fact* The business finally moved out of CEO Mike’s bedroom and into our first office.

2009

The editorial arm of Student Beans launched. With the intention of helping students to thrive, we shared with our student audience all the latest money-saving tricks, ways to stretch student finances that little bit further and discussed the hottest trends.

2010

We established The Beans Group as a brand and media owner of Student Beans.

2011

The very first Student Beans rebrand took place. Our orange logo ripened into berry blue.

2012

We acquired Reach Student and began to run the world’s largest youth marketing festival: YMS!
Not only that, we also successfully launched the award-winning Freshersfields, the world’s first online freshers fair.
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*fun fact* Our one millionth member signed up to Student Beans and we hit one million visits a month.

2013

In 2013, we began expanding our horizons even further by launching Voxburner, the Student Beans insights agency. Voxburner became the industry-leading youth insights platform, keeping marketers informed on the latest trends, habits and attitudes of Gen Z.

*fun fact* We also won The Digital Business of the Year award!

2014

This year we proudly launched our Student Beans iD iOS app! It even featured as the ‘best new app’ in the App Store.
YMS came to NYC for the very first time!

2015

We launched our award-winning digital verification tool, enabling brands to ensure their student discounts are only available to genuine students.

2016 - 2017

Student Beans goes global! We’re now able to verify student status in over 100 markets.

2022

Beans iD launched to help brands target and reach key market segments - like students, military personnel and healthcare workers. Put simply, Beans iD enables brands to position gated offers in front of valuable consumer groups and gives access to first-party data of verifiers.

*fun fact* We were crowned one of the UK's Best Workplaces and one of the UK’s Best Workplaces for Wellbeing.

2023

In 2023, we recognised that the breadth of our offering had outgrown the Student Beans moniker. We decided it was time for us to simplify who we are so that we can better support even more marketers to drive impact and growth.

*fun fact* We proudly celebrated our 18th birthday with plenty of champers and bumper discounts.

2024

Student Beans and Voxburner become Pion.
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True to our roots, Pion remains a dedicated leader in youth marketing insights, supporting marketers with full funnel youth marketing campaigns. Both Student Beans, Beans iD and YMS live on as endorsed brands of Pion.

Student Beans continues as the top rated student discount brand for students. YMS’ London and New York events will continue to pave the way as the world’s largest youth marketing conferences.