MedalVault - how I built a digital trophy cabinet for runners to improve race sustainability and cut down on waste

What if you could display all your medals in one place, and share the whole lot through a single link? That's the idea behind MedalVault, a digital trophy cabinet for runners.

During Covid I was taking part in virtual races and getting virtual medals. It's all we were allowed to do! But it made me think about why we get physical ones at all, and what we actually do with them afterwards. They're often really beautiful, the design is a real draw for a lot of runners. They're heavy and feel good round your neck, a physical manifestation of your achievement that you can display in a photo or hang up somewhere in your home.

But the reality for many of us who run is we end up with a growing pile of medals that, once photographed round your neck, go home and get discarded on the back of a door or in a drawer, never to see the light of day again. They sit hidden away until you either throw them out or your next of kin gets lumbered with your box of sporting achievements to deal with. Honestly, most will end up in landfill eventually, and that's a real waste of the resources we use to make them, ship them and dispose of them.

I spent hours talking this through with friends while running. What I wanted was to find a way of getting the same special feeling as getting a medal, without actually getting a medal. Parkrun does this really well, you don't get a medal but you get a milestone T-shirt after a certain number of runs (and if you're like me, these become your absolute favourite running tops), and everything else is a virtual thrill, checking your email weekly, watching little country flags appear in the app as you run in different countries. Could that approach, laid over my circular economy knowledge, lead to a more cost-effective and sustainable way of dealing with medals? What I wanted to build was a digital trophy cabinet, a place where you could collect all your medals virtually and then share your entire collection through a link.

It's not easy starting out, when most of your career you have had teams and people to help fill in your knowledge gaps. I had to learn how to build a web platform and set up a company from scratch, be my own comms person, my own marketing person, working out how to talk about MedalVault without scaring runners off, and what pricing models would actually work (still not 100% sure I've got that right, but time will tell). I had to work out how to approach future users, what deals would get them onto the platform, and how it could work as a hybrid alongside physical medals recognising that the world isn't quite ready for 100% digital medals yet. Leaning into my own running club and the local running community has been invaluable both to test appetite and then the actual operating system as I built it.

Four months ago, MedalVault did not exist. In August 2026, it was tested at the Isle of Wight Half Marathon, and will be used to complement the medals at the Isle of Wight Marathon too, giving runners a more intricate design than the physical medal could ever carry on its own.

What exists now is a digital platform where race organisers can choose to be digital first, enabling runners to collect their medals in their own personal vault, which they can share on their social media channels. They can also download images of their medals and stats, not a boring race certificate, but the actual medal artwork in all its glory. Runners can group medals together and download them as a single image to print onto something they'll actually use and enjoy, a T-shirt made from responsibly sourced cotton, perhaps. Much like merch at a music festival, where you buy one hoodie with twenty bands on it, rather than twenty hoodies, each with its own band.

MedalVault is in its infancy and I am excited about where it will go from here. An extension of the wealth of knowledge I have developed on circular business models and how circularity can work in today's world. This idea is not only good for the planet, it is also more affordable for race organisers and gives runners more choice on how to showcase their achievements.