Every Coin Tells a Story. Ours Started at Oshkosh.
When Meredith and I drove into Oshkosh for AirVenture 2019, we had been married less than a month. Aviation Soul was barely more than an idea we'd dreamed up that spring, built on the notion that aviation milestones deserved something you could hold in your hand instead of file in a drawer.
Like most first-time entrepreneurs, I was wildly optimistic. I had convinced myself we would sell 2,000 challenge coins that week. The logic seemed sound: hundreds of thousands of aviation enthusiasts attend AirVenture. Surely a tiny fraction would want one.
I laugh about that number now. Not because it was ambitious, but because I completely misunderstood what Oshkosh is. AirVenture is not a market. It is a town that assembles itself out of nothing every July, with its own streets and neighborhoods and traditions. You do not show up to a town and sell 2,000 of anything. You show up, and you start becoming part of it.
Nobody taught us that lesson faster than the people in these stories.
“Keep coming back”
Our first year was humbling. Sales were slower than I'd hoped, and by midweek I was quietly wondering if we had made a very expensive mistake.
Then an EAA volunteer photographer wandered into our booth. He looked over the coins, smiled, and told us how much he loved the idea. A little while later he came back. Then, later, he stopped by again. Every visit was the same: a few encouraging words before heading back out across the grounds.
Before he left for the last time, he said something that has stayed with me ever since: “Keep coming back. It takes two or three years for people to find you.”
At the time it felt like simple encouragement. Years later, I know it was some of the best business advice I have ever received. He wasn't just talking about customers. He was talking about becoming part of the community.
Kelly found us
Later that same week, a newly minted Gold Seal flight instructor named Kelly stopped at our table and picked up several First Solo coins. She told me she had always given her students paper certificates after their first solo flight. “But I've always wanted something nicer than a piece of paper.”
Every instructor knows the moment she meant. A student climbs out of the airplane after their first solo, still vibrating, and tradition hands them a cut-up shirttail and a certificate. Kelly wanted that moment to weigh something. To sit in a pocket. To still be in a desk drawer thirty years later.
Those first ten coins were not just another sale. They were proof that we were not selling souvenirs. That conversation planted the seed for what became our CFI Pack, and it changed how we understood our own company: we were helping instructors mark the chapters of a pilot's life.
Robin made it a tradition
Robin is a designated pilot examiner I met at Oshkosh a few years later. He gives one of our coins to every applicant who passes a checkride. Not just private pilots. Instrument ratings, commercial certificates, instructor certificates, endorsements, all of it.
His first order was modest. Then another. Then another. Today he orders fifty at a time.
The reorders were never the exciting part. The exciting part is knowing that somewhere, on a regular basis, the last thing that happens in one of the biggest moments of a pilot's life is Robin shaking their hand and pressing one of our coins into it. Watching something you created quietly become part of someone else's story may be the most rewarding part of this business.
Rob stopped being a customer
A few years ago a retired Marine named Rob wandered into our booth carrying a satchel full of challenge coins, patches, and pins collected over a lifetime. We started talking. He came back the next day. And the next.
Now we stay in touch all year. This weekend we helped him stake out his campsite before the show. After he finishes volunteering with the Warbirds each day, he'll spend a few hours helping us in the booth.
There is no word for that in retail. At Oshkosh, the word is just friend.
The day Meredith met the big dog
In 2022 it was still just the two of us working the booth. I stepped away for a few minutes, and when I came back Meredith was wrapping up a conversation with a friendly gentleman. She introduced me, I shook his hand, and he went on his way.
“Meredith, do you know who that was? That was Jack Pelton!”
“Yeah, he was really nice,” she said. “He said he wants to get challenge coins into the EAA gift shops.”
“Meredith, that's the head of EAA. The big dog!”
She had given the man who runs EAA the full Aviation Soul pitch without knowing who he was, and the coins had done the rest. Later that week one of EAA's buyers stopped by the booth, and that is how our EAA retail line was born. Since then we have created roughly two dozen unique designs for EAA, not counting reorders: the challenge coins sold in the gift shops since 2023, plus coins for their Pilot Proficiency Center launch, their business development and security teams, and their lifetime members. If you have picked up a challenge coin at an EAA shop in the last few years, you already own our work and maybe never knew it.
The best part is what that partnership looks like behind the scenes. It looks like family and friends packed around our kitchen island on a weeknight, gluing coins to backer cards and packing boxes while Aviation Soul buys the pizza. We call it forced family fun, even though half the crew is friends who keep volunteering for it. Everybody shows up.
And once, it looked like me flying my flying club's plane up to Wittman on a random weekday, the back loaded with boxes of coins, weight and balance carefully done, to deliver an order straight to the buyer at the EAA warehouse. Every pilot remembers their first flight with a real mission, the first one that isn't training or the hundred dollar hamburger. Mine was delivering coins, by air, to the people who put on the world's greatest aviation celebration. I am not sure it gets more full circle than that.
Delivery day at Wittman Regional! The back seats were full of coins and the weight and balance was done twice.
The part nobody photographs
There are moments every year that remind me where we are. Waking up in Camp Scholler to the legendary yodeler. Feeling the afterburners of an F-22 in your chest before your ears fully register the sound. The unmistakable growl of the T-6 Texans overhead, and the calm cadence of AirVenture's controllers orchestrating impossible choreography into Wittman Regional.
But my favorite scene is one nobody photographs. It is the Saturday before opening day. It is hot. We are hauling boxes into a hangar that holds July heat like an oven, sweating through our shirts while that endless conga line of arrivals streams overhead. Our friends and hangar neighbors from Huffy's Windsocks stop by mid-setup to say welcome back. It is controlled chaos, and it is ours.
And every year, somewhere in that heat, one of us says it out loud: sometimes I wonder why we're doing all this.
By the end of the week we are hot, sore, and emotionally exhausted. And every year, we sign up again before we leave. Because the answer is standing all around us. It is Kelly's students and Robin's checkride handshakes and Rob's campsite. It is a volunteer photographer who decided two newlyweds with a crazy idea were worth encouraging, and a gift shop conversation Meredith didn't know she was having. It is finding one of our stickers in the wild on a bicycle somewhere across the grounds. It is customers who email before the show even opens asking if this year's KOSH coin is ready, because giving one to a friend on the flightline has become their tradition, not just ours.
People call Oshkosh aviation's family reunion, and they are right. Families grow one relationship at a time.
What success looks like now
In 2019, success meant selling 2,000 coins. This year it means something different. I hope we meet a few future custom coin partners. I hope we connect with schools and clubs looking for meaningful ways to recognize their people. I hope I spend more time out walking the grounds than standing behind the table, introducing myself to people I would normally be too shy to approach.
Most of all, I hope we leave with a few more stories. That is what we have really been collecting all these years. The coins just happen to be made of metal. The stories are what make them priceless.
Come say hello
We'll be at AirVenture 2026 all week, July 20 through 26, in Hangar D, booth 4046. The KOSH 2026 coin is minted, dated, and limited; when it's gone, it's gone. Stop by the EAA gift shops too, and take a close look at the challenge coins while you're there. And if you are an instructor, an examiner, a flight school, or a club with a milestone worth marking, come talk to us. That conversation is our favorite part of the show.
It is how every one of these stories started.