Category Innovation - Keep Running Medals
Turning Medals into Social Currency: Growing a ¥500M+ Revenue Stream
Annual Revenue
¥500M+ (approx. $75M USD)
Peak Participants per Event
700,000+ (vs. 20,000 average previously)
Total Engagements
8 million+
Annual Events Hosted
100+
Through a series of experience-driven innovations, Keep's medal challenges successfully sparked exercise enthusiasm among young users.
Against a backdrop of slowing internet industry growth, the medal business transformed from a design team side project into a core revenue driver—achieving 2x GMV growth and over ¥500M in annual revenue by 2023.
Timeline:
12 weeks, Apr – Jun 2022 (two experiments, rapid iteration)
My Role:
Lead Product Designer. I owned interaction design, A/B test strategy, and motion design specifications, collaborating closely with PM and engineering.
Project Overview
Keep's Sanrio IP collaboration and couples gifting medals to each other went viral on social media—triggering explosive growth among young users.
How might we motivate young people who don't love exercise?
😖
🏅
😍
Fall in love with exercise
Rarely exercises
lacks motivation
procrastinates
Exercise is hard
Motivated by medals
Visual appeal instant feedback social sharing
......
Sense of achievement meaning
fun
The Viral Moment That Changed Everything
Design Strategy and Goals
Experiment 1: Emotional Resonance — Designing for Gifting
The Opportunity
If couples were already gifting medals to each other, could we design an experience that makes the gift feel more meaningful?
Emotion-Driven Sharing – Extending Physical Medals into Digital Assets
Using innovative interactions to bring medals to life, enhancing user immersion,
combining personalization to amplify social emotions, and inspiring sharing & virality
Feedback & Metrics
Result：The experimental group had a 30% higher race completion rate and a 20% higher purchasing conversion rate compared to the control group.
Experiment 2: Amplifying Collecting Habits — Blind Box Mechanics
The Opportunity
Users with strong collecting tendencies—especially those familiar with IP merchandise—showed high engagement rates.
Many were heavy consumers of blind box products, making them ideal for IP-themed medal events.
Why Do Users Engage in IP Consumption?
Initial Loading
Switch to Another
Unboxing
(option 1)
Unboxing
(option 2 Final Decision)
Animation Demo
Feedback & Metrics
Emotional engagement: The blind box gameplay triggered excitement, happiness, thrill—and sometimes frustration. Many users became addicted to the process.
Social trading:Medal exchange topics on Xiaohongshu gained significant traction. Users who didn't get their preferred medal posted to find trading partners.
Unexpected behavior:
The mechanic was creating community, not just transactions.
Result：The experimental group averaged 2.4 participations per user, with over 50% of users participating multiple times.
Subsequent Iterations
Ring-shaped Medal and Voice Messages
Emotion-Driven Connection Between Physical & Virtual
User Pain Point:
Long delivery time for physical medals
Start Playing First!
Replicate the real-world behavior of displaying medals — users can freely arrange and showcase medals in a virtual medal shelf space
Expanding Commercialization: Themed Medal Shelves
Custom medal shelves for race series, motivating users to collect complete medal sets
Reflections
On Incentive Design
Exercise is often framed as willpower vs. laziness.
But medals worked differently: they aligned with desires people already had—self-expression, gift-giving, collecting, social connection.
We didn't make running "easier." We made the reward structure match how young Chinese users were already living their lives.
