Every story has a beginning - The Story behind Zero Waste Medals

We are proud of the work we do and love sharing our story so we hope you enjoy it too.

So first things first...thanks for reading this blog!

Secondly, do any of you recognise these guys? 

For those of you who do, a big hello from us! (Michael, Neil and Andrew)

Now you've probably spoken to Andrew already, but let's fill in the blanks anyway.

Story time:
6 years ago now (gosh that's just flown) we started a business called www.mysportsandmore.com

It's still very much going to this day but without starting MySports and More we would've never ended up making medals in the first place.

We sell online but also used to go to a lot of race events. We even took part in some of them!

This was a bit of an eye opener to us in terms of what it takes to put on an event and as the MySports business grew we developed our own printing department (Local Print Pros << click to see it) to take on the demand for the running club kits that we started doing for people.

In time this developed into suppling small quantities for race directors too, and a question that often came with that was "Do you know any one that does medals?"

Now back then we had a few sources for metal medals but that wasn't the sort of answer we wanted to give.  More often than not, these have to travel many 100s or 1000s of miles to get to the start line and that doesnt fit well with us.

So instead, one day about a year and a half ago. Neil brought back our very first Blue Co2 laser.

Neil "claimed" that this machine could cut wood and engrave it too. Myself and Andrew couldn't believe it but in no less than a week we had our first order for wooden medals. Check out the first order we did here: Our First Medal - Oakengates 5k - where it all began – Zero Waste Medals (wooden-medals.co.uk)

Don't get me wrong we had some issues and tweaks to do initially (I wasn't very good at sewing ribbon its got to be said! lol) but we got there.

And we've never looked back. 

Since then we've gone strength to strength and have taken on 2 members of staff in the medals department alone:



Everyone say hello to Jon!

Jon was a friend of the business already and had shown a keen interest in what we had going on. But he had never imagined moving out of his post in the dot com section of Tesco and become our senior designer and laser manager. 

Since about October he's made every medal you see on our website today!

Lets not forget about Jess either

Jess joined the same time as Jon under an apprenticeship scheme. She assists Jon with the day to day tasks in the medal workshop including ribboning up medals, quality checking and she's also responsible for replying to all your lovely trust pilot reviews which you can read here

So that's the team so far! We'll soon be doing some Q&A's with the team so keep your eyes peeled for those.

Thank you for reading!