VÅGA | The Story
September 01, 2026A running cap is undeniably a fairly humble bit of kit, but it’s also an important one. Especially if you run in the Lake District, where experiencing four seasons in one day comes with the territory. And if you never know what the weather will do next, an inadequate cap goes from being just a minor inconvenience to a specific, continual frustration – one that only gets more irritating as the miles stack up. VÅGA started in 2020 when a couple of runners in Milnthorpe, on the southern fringe of the Lakes, decided enough was enough. It was time to make a better cap themselves.
Former PE teacher John Mason founded the company, with ultra runner Ellis Bland joining as co-founder and director. Bland brings genuine race pedigree to the brand. He's won outright at the Lakes in a Day Ultra, the Manx Mountain Marathon and the Plague RAT 100k. He's also taken second at the notoriously tough Arc of Attrition 100-miler in Cornwall, and lined up at CCC, one of the races that make up UTMB's Mont Blanc week in the Alps.
Then again, the Bland surname carries plenty of weight of its own in the history of British running, which has nothing to do with Ellis personally. There's a whole clan of them scattered across Cumbria: the Borrowdale Blands, Billy chief among them, arguably the finest long-distance fell runner there's ever been (and a fierce rival of the legendary Joss Naylor), still holding records from the 1970s that modern runners can't get near. Separately, there are also the Kendal Blands, descended from the late, great Pete Bland, whose eponymous running shop became as much a fixture of Lakeland fell running as any race on the calendar.
Ellis is disarmingly honest about where he actually fits into that lineage. "I don't really fit into it anywhere," he has said. "I'm forever getting dragged into it when I'm running well, and forever getting booted out of it when I'm running badly." As for the obvious assumption, he's equally clear: "There's no direct relation – Billy Bland is not my dad, nor would I want him to be, because to try and fill those shoes would be a phenomenal ask." It's a fairly good preview of how VÅGA tends to see itself more broadly – comfortable sitting inside a tradition without ever pretending to be part of the elite.
Cumbria and COVID
But back to the origins of the brand itself. It's worth remembering what kind of year 2020 was for anyone who ran. With gyms shut and travel off the table due to COVID, a lot of runners found themselves doing the same handful of local routes on repeat ("only exercise from your front door", remember?), which has a way of turning small annoyances into things you finally do something about. Starting a specialist headwear brand in the middle of a lockdown was thus either terrible timing or exactly the moment enough people were paying close attention to their kit to notice something better had turned up.
The first VÅGA cap was a softshell, short-peak design meant to survive a full season of fell racing. It worked well enough that it stopped staying local. What began as caps sold to fell runners around the Lakes organically pulled in trail runners, hikers and backpackers who'd heard about them from people they shared the fells with – the kind of growth that happens one recommendation at a time rather than through any marketing budget. Today, VÅGA calls its customer base 'Team VÅGA', and the pitch, such as it is, has nothing to do with pace: the company's own line is that it's about why someone runs rather than how fast, how long or how high. Basically, anyone can be on the team.
The Short Peak
If there's a single design decision that separates VÅGA from the running-cap brands people already knew, it's the short peak. Most running caps borrow their proportions from baseball caps, which is a shape built for shading a batter's eyes from a sun directly overhead, not for someone moving fast with their head tilted forward on a descent. VÅGA cut the peak down, on the logic that a fell runner picking a line down a scree slope needs to see their feet, not the inside of a visor.
John Mason remembers: "We couldn't get our heads around why most running caps adopted a long, structured peak, as this only made the product heavier, claustrophobic and more likely to be whipped off our heads. Our answer was to shorten the peak to 5cm. By doing this, and making it malleable, we reduced weight, improved visibility, and created a packable running cap that stays secure in any weather".
The obsession with small adjustments runs right through the range. Materials lean on recycled polyester carrying Global Recycle Standard certification, with garments also meeting OEKO-TEX Standard 100, which tests for a long list of substances that have no business being anywhere near something worn against your skin for hours at a time.
Styles For Miles
The full VÅGA range runs to dozens of colourways across a dozen-plus styles, but the pieces that make sense for most people sit at either end of a simple spectrum: built for racing, or built for whatever the weather throws at you.
At the technical end, the Feather Racing Cap strips everything back to around 35–42g – open-pore mesh, a laser-cut peak, and a five-panel build that moulds to the head rather than sitting on top of it, aimed at the sort of runner who wants to forget they're wearing anything at all. The Fell Cap 2.0 sits at the opposite end of the same idea: a fully waterproof, taped-seam version built for exactly the kind of 'sensible people stay inside' weather the Lake District specialises in, with the same short-peak logic just wrapped in a shell that can survive it.
In between, the Club Cap is the one VÅGA itself frames as the do-it-all option – not the lightest or the most technical, just reliably good whether that's for running intervals, easy miles, or the jog to the local shop. The Drift Cap takes a slightly more structured six-panel build and pitches it more at everyday wear than racing, while the Washed Cotton Cap drops the technical fabric altogether for pre-softened midweight cotton, aimed squarely at the days when performance isn't really the point.
It's a range built by people who continually think about caps considerably harder than anyone else, particularly when they're actually out running.
Built For The Masses
Ask Ellis Bland why VÅGA exists at all, and the answer starts, oddly, with his dad's cycling habit. His father had run in the fells until arthritis in both knees and ankles put paid to that when he hit 40. Instead, in true MAMIL tradition, he bought a bike and a cycling jersey. Though he didn't skimp on the bike, the jersey only cost about £20. He wore it until it fell apart, roughly six years later. He duly went looking for another one – by which point, the same jersey now cost £170. That jump made Ellis Bland look at modern running gear with the same question: when did a pair of split shorts start costing £80? When did a t-shirt start pretending it could get you onto a podium, at £100 a time?
What he and co-founder John Mason landed on was less a business plan than an objection. Most performance running brands, in Bland's view, are built for the runners at the sharp end of the field – the ones actually racing to win. "In a race of 500 people, five runners think they can win," he's said. "495 people are there because they just love running." His argument is that almost nobody in the industry builds specifically for that much larger group, and VÅGA's founding idea was to be the exception: a brand that people running mid-pack, or well back from it, can wear without feeling like they've wandered into the wrong conversation. Not, as he puts it, "this weird further-faster-vaporfly movement, which just sort of leaves you ostracised, even if you're quite a good runner."
It's a deliberately focused ambition, and Bland seems to like it that way. Years into being a real company with multiple retail relationships (and some impressive brand collabs behind them), VÅGA has stayed almost entirely inside headwear – not for lack of ideas, but because Bland treats expansion as something to be earned rather than assumed. "It's important that we make the best running cap in the world," he's said, "so that the minute we do hit the button and bring something else out, people will say: oh, VÅGA is doing socks now, but they do make the best cap in the world, so of course they can do that." By his own account they're not there yet, and he's in no hurry to find out otherwise. Asked what the most outrageous new product on the horizon might be, his answer undersells itself on purpose: a headband. "Basically," he says, "half a hat."
That restraint cuts against what most small outdoor brands tend to do once they've found an audience – diversify fast, chase every adjacent category, put the logo on whatever will carry it. VÅGA's version of growth has mostly meant doing the same job better: refining a peak by a few millimetres, tightening a headband, choosing recycled polyester because it was the right call rather than the loud one. Whether that's a considered long-term strategy or just where a company this size happens to be six years in, the caps that the brand makes are the result of it – designed by people who'd clearly rather be masters at one thing than chase trends. Hats off to them.
And the brand is growing in spite of its founders' humility, even beyond British shores. VÅGA now runs a second base in Amsterdam specifically to serve EU and EFTA customers without the delays and import costs of shipping every order out of Cumbria. It's meant that the brand's headwear is now increasingly seen in bigger mountains than ours, and on some of the world's biggest stages, including in premier race series' like the UTMB. A cap that started out surviving wet Tuesdays above Milnthorpe, now turning up on ridges under Mont Blanc. It's a remarkable story. But no matter how big VÅGA gets, its spiritual home will always be the fells of the Lake District.