Behind the scenes at On, a brand driven by design, innovation and experimentation

On Sunday 11 August, as the world’s fastest long-distance runners prepared to set off on the Women’s Marathon at the Paris Olympics, if you were to cast your gaze down the starting line, you’d have seen a pair of highly unusual shoes. Hellen Obiri, the Kenyan four-time world champion and reigning Boston and New York City Marathon champion, was sporting the Cloudboom Strike LS. This new shoe from Swiss sportswear brand On is set to revolutionise the way that high-performance trainers are manufactured and delivered to customers around the world. Like Obiri herself, these shoes are a game-changer.

To discover how a brand envisions, designs and then actually manufactures such a revolutionary product, you have to understand its ethos, to go behind the scenes with its designers and innovation teams, and to find out what makes them tick. Where does the initial inspiration come from? Who are the people working together to make it possible? And what can designers and creatives outside of the footwear world learn from this process? We spoke with a range of people at On, including its chief design officer, to learn how this company, which is setting the pace for all sportswear brands today, approaches design and combines it with innovation.

First, though, let’s unpack what makes the Cloudboom Strike LS such a pioneering shoe. The trainer is created using LightSpray™ technology, a fast, fully automated manufacturing process whereby a robotic arm spins a thermoplastic material onto the sole to create the upper (the top part of the shoe). The technology means that a shoe upper can be produced in just three minutes and in a way that is 75 percent more sustainable than On’s conventional uppers. It also means that, eventually, shoes will be able to be manufactured in smaller production “cells” near to where consumers live, reducing the need for shipping products around the globe.

A product like the Cloudboom Strike LS is the result of collaboration between many, many team members across a range of different departments, all driven by the same mindset. Few people are more qualified than Thilo Alex Brunner, the brand’s chief design officer (CDO), to explain that ethos. On’s co-founders – David Allemann, Caspar Coppetti and former Swiss Ironman champion Olivier Bernhard – approached Thilo in 2009, before the company had even been officially launched. At the time, he was a rising star in the Swiss industrial design realm, having worked for watch giant Swatch and a variety of other design-led brands. “Like the founders themselves,” he says, “I had no former footwear experience.”

Despite the fact that they were all warned “countless times” about entering the highly competitive footwear industry without any experience, Thilo says it was their “incredible optimism and will to make something new” that drove them in those early days. His first task was to design the brand’s first shoe. “I had two goals,” he explains. “To not make it look like any other piece of footwear on the market, and to create a visual promise, so customers would immediately understand what the technology does and try on the shoe.” The final result was the Cloudsurfer, the first shoe that On brought to market, which debuted at the Ispo trade fair in Munich in 2010. That was followed soon after by the Cloudracer, a high-performance shoe launched in 2012. By 2013, Belgian triathlete Frederik Van Lierde had won a gold medal (the first of many for On) wearing the shoe at the Ironman World Championship in Kona. This gives you a small sense of the kind of place On is: experimental, bold and fully unwilling to replicate what has already been done before.

“How we work at On is very much like in a research laboratory,” says Maia Zheliazkova, who works as an innovation concept designer at On. An architect by training, she now describes herself as a computational designer, a discipline which, she explains, “involves the use of algorithms, simulations and data analysis to solve sophisticated design problems”. She spent much of her early career in academia and says many of the same approaches and methodologies exist within On. “We often have to build knowledge from the ground up,” she says. “In the same way I would experiment with new materials, fabrication technologies or design tools during my doctorate, I am now able to do it at On.”

However, there is one monumental contrast between the world of academia and the sportswear industry. “The biggest difference is in the timeline,” says Maia. “The nature of this industry requires that the developments and applications happen at a much faster pace. But this also means that the knowledge, together with the product, can reach the people earlier, which I find very exciting.”

This combination of an experimental approach and a fast timeline can also be seen in the work that Stefanie Herbstrith carries out. She is a lead apparel designer at On, focused on the partnerships that the brand works on with collaborators. In just the past few months, she has worked on and launched huge (and hugely popular) collections in partnership with Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe and with film actor Zendaya. She and her team have what they call a “maker space” in Zurich, which allows them to “create prototypes and test new ideas in a matter of days”, she says. “I believe that having the creative process close to the actual making of the product sparks different kinds of ideas and allows us to react more spontaneously.”

Maia agrees with this wholeheartedly. “We have the ability to iterate and tweak every aspect of the upper and do it onsite every day,” she says. “For me as an architect, this is the dream scenario – to be able to immediately touch what I draw and conceptualise.”

This speed of experimentation and execution is underpinned by two essential pillars: clear communication and collaboration. When it comes to communication, Thilo has spent much of the past 15 years teaching at ÉCAL, the world-leading university of art and design located in Lausanne, Switzerland, and he feels he has brought some of the communication culture from that seat of learning into On. When asked to list the foundations of this culture, he says: “Listening and asking questions, and the ability to give – hopefully – thoughtful feedback on countless projects in a single day; and to celebrate good debates. As the saying goes: When tutoring, the professors learn as much as the students.”

This culture leads to some of the brand’s best breakthroughs and innovations. “On values the diverse perspective that each specialist or collaborator can bring,” says Maia. “If you have an idea or a potential solution to an existing problem, you can bring it up to the team where it will be heard and discussed. No thought is off the table.”

This culture of free and open communication enables a high level of collaboration. As Ilmarin Heitz, senior director of innovation, puts it: “Collaboration between innovation and design teams is a cornerstone of our process.” According to Thilo, who runs the design side of the brand, this symbiosis is absolutely crucial. “Brilliant ideas are born and then evolve with science,” he says, “but without giving those ideas a face, they’re often damned, because for most people, they seem too abstract to be tangible and worth supporting.”

Nowhere is the symbiotic relationship between design and innovation more visible than in the way On approaches sustainability, which is a central focus for the brand. As Ilmarin puts it, “Many of our ideas stem from addressing needs or problems that we observe with our athletes, consumers and the planet.” Moreover, when Thilo is asked what most drives and motivates him, he answers: “Today it’s the question of how product performance can be more in tune with the planet and how sustainability will redefine the looks of products over the decades to come.”

In fact, Thilo believes a shift in aesthetics is really just around the corner. “A new generation of materials and a new generation of production processes will redefine how products will look in the future,” he says. “I believe that right now, with our legacy of colourful and glossy products, we are still in the process of fading out the era of the 1960s ‘plastic fantastic’ aesthetics. Time to let go now.” This is the perfect example of where design can, to borrow his phrase, “give a face” to an important innovation. “It is the duty of design,” he says, “to help these new materials and processes have the right expression to be able to break through and have a lasting impact.”

Which brings us back to LightSpray. The story behind how this new technology and production process came about incorporates everything we’ve heard so far: a highly scientific, experimental approach; broad collaboration across disciplines; open communication; and design giving a face to a highly technical and complex innovation.

The initial idea that eventually became LightSpray stemmed from a fateful visit to Milan Design Week in 2019, where one member of the On team observed a student presentation, in which a shoe was created using a hot-glue gun. That student was Johannes Voelchert, who is now a senior lead of innovation technology design.

This approach to sourcing new ideas is typical at On. “My personal ethos is to ‘look where you would least expect it,’” says Ilmarin Heitz. “I believe that seeking inspiration from diverse and unexpected sources is fundamental to driving innovation.” Chief design officer Thilo agrees that you’ve got to step outside of your own bubble in order to find inspiration. “I don’t look that often at competitors’ shoes or apparel,” he says. “I do that for commercial benchmarking. But to find inspiration for new designs, I prefer to look at totally different industries on the one hand, and spend enough time outdoors on the other.”

Although the initial seed of the idea for LightSpray was sown in 2019, it would take years of research, experimentation and development before it was practically usable. As Ilmarin explains, at first, it wasn’t even clear that the technology would or could lead to a viable product in the long run. “In the early stages of the LightSpray project, we didn’t establish a specific objective or goal,” he says. “Instead, we allowed the project to evolve organically, exploring its potential and discovering where it could lead us.”

Maia Zheliazkova learned about the project on her very first day at On in March 2022. “In the initial phases, we had to deal with a lot of unknowns,” says the innovation concept designer, who worked on developing the algorithms that dictate the path of the robotic arm. “With time, we started being more rigorous in the experiments, and spent a lot of time negotiating the design parameters with the machine settings.” It was an unusual project, because the production process was as experimental as the product itself: “We designed the process together with the product.”

On believes that this technology will revolutionise the way that the company, and eventually the entire footwear industry, manufactures and delivers products to customers. The key is that On is planning to launch a number of what it calls “production cells” – essentially miniature robotic workshops – around the world to produce the Cloudboom Strike LS. “By decentralising production and bringing it closer to the markets, we aim to reduce transportation costs, minimise the carbon footprint and shorten lead times,” says Ilmarin. “This local, on-demand manufacturing approach not only enhances efficiency but also enables us to respond more quickly to customer needs and market trends, ultimately revolutionising the global footwear industry.”

In many ways, LightSpray is a direct continuation of the spirit that was present when On was established as a young, experimental and ambitious brand that was uncompromising in its desire to break new ground and not follow the pack. Indeed, it is the embodiment of the fire that burns within every athlete as well, not least Hellen Obiri, who ended up winning the bronze medal in Paris, sporting the Cloudboom Strike LS.