The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2021–2023
Keep turns paid virtual races into mailed collectible medals — 1.1M+ users in 8 months
A fitness app turns a ¥39 virtual race into a physical collectible that arrives by mail — 1.1M+ paying users in eight months.
Keep
What it had to solve
By 2021 Keep was China's largest fitness app, with roughly 300 million registered users, but it had never made a profit: courses, memberships, hardware and offline gyms all lost money, and its Hong Kong IPO attempts kept stalling. Then a viral video of a boyfriend running a 520-themed medal for his partner flooded the app with young, mostly female users who were not runners — they had come for the medal.
How it works
Keep, China's biggest fitness app, had spent years trying to monetize 300 million registered users through courses, subscriptions, hardware and gyms — and had stayed loss-making through it all. The breakthrough came from a byproduct: its online marathon events, started in 2015 for runners who could not reach real races, whose entry fee bought a physical medal.
The mechanic was simple: pay ¥39 to register for a themed virtual race, run 1–5 km inside the event window, and receive a designed medal in the mail. In May 2021 a user's Douyin video of gifting the 520-themed medal went viral, and Keep realized the buyers were not runners but young women collecting something pretty to post. It doubled down: licensed medals from Sanrio's Cinnamoroll, Crayon Shin-chan, Chibi Maruko-chan and Detective Conan, scheduled events around romance-heavy holidays, and pushed participants to share on Douyin and Xiaohongshu.
The numbers followed: over 1.1 million paying users and more than ¥50 million in GMV across eight months from October 2021, ¥40.5 million of online paid-content revenue in Q1 2022 (up 728% year on year), and 400,000+ paying users for one Cinnamoroll run. The medal became a social currency — and an industry: proxy runners charged per kilometer, resellers flipped sold-out designs, and rival apps Codoon and Yuepaoquan copied the format.
Why it lands
- The unit sold flipped from 'exercise' (unpleasant, unbuyable) to 'proof of exercise' (a pretty, giftable object), which the existing app could already produce.
- Licensed IP turned a generic fitness reward into a fandom product, so the medal carried its own audience and its own reason to post.
- The 1–5 km requirement kept the barrier low enough that non-runners joined, converting a health habit into a collectible habit.
- Holiday timing gave the medal a social purpose — a gift for a partner — which generated the organic Douyin and Xiaohongshu videos that recruited the next wave of users.
What it did
In the eight months from October 2021, more than 1.1 million paying users registered for Keep's virtual events, generating over ¥50 million in GMV; online paid-content revenue hit ¥40.5 million in Q1 2022 alone, up 728% year on year, and the membership-plus-online-paid segment grew from ¥558 million in 2021 to ¥894 million in 2022. A single Sanrio Cinnamoroll run drew more than 400,000 paying users, and one late-2022 event attracted 300,000 participants. The boom also spawned a paid 'proxy running' economy and a resale market for medals.
What you can take
If the emotional object is the product, the workout becomes its price of admission: users paid for a medal they could post, and the exercise came along for free.
Since then
Keep denied a rumor that medals alone had earned it ¥500 million, citing its prospectus figure of 1.1M+ paying users and ¥50M+ GMV in eight months. In 2022 medal production costs squeezed margins, and overall gross margin slipped to 40.7%. By early 2023 the craze cooled — a single March–May 2022 event had drawn more paying users than eight recent events — while resale and 'proxy running' grew. Keep still ran 40+ concurrent events, insisted medals were motivation rather than consumer goods, and kept pursuing its Hong Kong listing.
Sources
- How fitness-app medals became young people's new social currency
- Does the medal really earn Keep 500 million? How Keep suddenly learned to make money
- More medals, more urgency: why Keep is leaning on its medal business
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