Ons have a confusing name, weird soles and a funny logo. The company that makes them is also dominating the running shoe and comfy sneaker boom.

Vinnie Petrarca is the unlikely face of the latest running boom—or running shoe boom, rather. The real estate broker spends much of his life on his feet, strolling with clients along the endless boardwalks of Fire Island, New York. For years he wore New Balance sneakers on the job. Then he watched a proliferation of new brands appear on his neighbors’ feet—in particular, sleek sneakers with a squishy row of tubes that doubled as the sole. After hearing friends rave about their comfort, he finally ordered a pair in the summer of 2023, though he only had a rough idea of what he was looking for.

For one thing, he thought the company was called On Cloud. He also surmised that the brand’s logo belonged to Lululemon. (The brand is On, the model is Cloud, and no, its logo is not Lululemon’s.) And while he’s now a devoted customer, he only learned while being interviewed for this story that On Holding AG is a company based in Switzerland. That makes sense, he reasons—the Swiss are known for their feats of engineering. “They make good watches,” he says. “Why shouldn’t they make good sneakers?”

Half a world away, two other recent On converts are sipping espresso at a hip Munich cafe after a Monday morning run. Erik Schereder became a fan in July after receiving free gear at a 24-hour race sponsored by the company, part of its ongoing grassroots marketing. After running in the brand’s plushly cushioned Cloudmonster model, which retails for about $200, he persuaded his buddy Leon Buchholz to buy a pair. “For daily training runs, these are the best,” says Buchholz, a venture capitalist who’d previously tried running shoes from New Balance and Hoka, but “these are the most comfortable, and fast.” After a recent visit to an On store in Berlin, he’s also impressed with the brand’s slick, minimalist aesthetic. “They’re the Apple of running.”

It’s the kind of high praise most brands would kill for, and in On’s case it’s been a decade-and-a-half in the making. In the late 2010s, Nike Inc. helped spur the current running shoe revival with the introduction of its carbon-plated racing shoes. But then it and Adidas AG soon stumbled after leaning too heavily into fashion rather than performance. Nike only compounded its problems by pulling many of its sneakers out of retailers—especially stores that cater to serious runners—hoping to juice profits by selling directly to the masses.

Which left an opening for an upstart brand like On just as running culture was peaking and nonrunners were hungry to discover the next hip shoe that wouldn’t destroy their feet. In the past three years, the US running shoe market has ballooned by 20%, to $7.4 billion as of October, according to market researcher Circana LLC, with only 43% of buyers using those shoes for exercise. The running shoe market is expected to keep growing faster than the rest of footwear, both in terms of people buying the products and the average selling prices of the sneakers, says Janine Stichter, an analyst at BTIG LLC.

On, which is based in Zurich and run by five partners with an earnest management philosophy rooted in “Swiss democracy,” brought in about $2.5 billion in sales in 2024. That 30% year-over-year growth is impressive, but it’s still a long way from Adidas’ nearly $25 billion or Nike’s almost $50 billion in annual revenue. Despite the brand seeming to appear everywhere from sidewalks to supermarkets to trading floors, On still has only about a 2% share of the global athletic footwear market.

The company’s challenge is to maintain its momentum as it grows, while not losing its street cred among athletes. The sports world is littered with brands—think Reebok and Under Armour—that failed to make this transition. Now On, whose stated ambition is to become the “most premium global sportswear brand,” is trying to pull every lever: entering more countries, building up its own sales channels, expanding beyond running, selling $450 puffer jackets and $150 T-shirts and enlisting celebrity brand ambassadors such as Zendaya and FKA twigs. And, of course, figuring out how to bring to market the next multibillion-dollar sneaker technology to dazzle the public’s feet the way it’s managed to do with its CloudTec cushioning.

“You will always see ups and downs and innovation cycles and struggles, and On will also be in one of those places at some point,” says co-Chief Executive Officer Marc Maurer from the company’s headquarters, with its picturesque views of the Alps. How big On gets will largely depend on its ability to strike that balance between customers trying to beat their personal best and those orthopedically inclined. “If that leads to us being bigger than Adidas or Nike,” he says, “that’s beautiful.”
 
Olivier Bernhard, a Swiss triathlete, was sponsored by Adidas and Nike in the ’90s and ’00s as he crisscrossed the globe competing in Ironman races from Hawaii to New Zealand. Also a tinkerer, he would sometimes show up to competitions with modifications to, say, his bike’s handlebars, which he once replaced with an aluminum, horn-shaped bar for weight reduction. In 2005, after a dozen years and too many injuries, Bernhard retired as a pro. He turned his attention to, among other things, trying to create a new type of running shoe.

Partnering with an engineer in Zurich, he tested a pair of Nikes with the bottoms shaved off and replaced with bits of a garden hose. He took them for a spin and felt elated, experiencing a shoe that combined a soft landing with an explosive takeoff. He pitched the idea to his old sponsors, Nike and Adidas. When they said no, he decided to develop the concept on his own. “If it’s not baked in our kitchen, it can’t be that good,” Bernhard recalls each sneaker giant more or less telling him. (Nike and Adidas did not respond to requests for comment.)

Bernhard called up Caspar Coppetti, a snowboarding enthusiast who’d once been his triathlon agent. Coppetti, who later worked at McKinsey & Co. and then a branding firm, told Bernhard it was stupid to try to compete in a market as mature and cutthroat as running shoes. But when Coppetti saw the prototype, he was captivated that you could vividly see the technology—the tubular outsole—which wasn’t buried beneath foam and rubber as in most shoes. The clincher was when he slipped on a pair and walked around a conference table. “I had never walked like this before,” he once said on a podcast. “You can not only see the technology, but you can feel it.”

Coppetti called an old McKinsey colleague, David Allemann, who by then was head of marketing at the boutique furniture design firm Vitra. Together, the three did what many Swiss do when contemplating a big decision: They went hiking. On a mountain trail high above the glitzy resort of St. Moritz, they reached a consensus. Switzerland may not be famous for its startups, but perhaps they could blaze a trail of their own. Entering middle age in a wealthy, safe country, with a bit of money in their bank accounts, they wondered: If they couldn’t be entrepreneurial, then who could?

Bernhard took the lead on developing shoe technology and persuading professional athletes to give it a shot. Allemann set off for Asia to learn the ropes of manufacturing and secure production capacity. Coppetti began barnstorming Europe, the US and Japan, begging owners of running shops to go for a jog with him in the sneakers and maybe even carry the products on their shelves. These owners, he reasoned, were the ultimate influencers. If you convince them of the superiority of your shoe, perhaps they’ll convince other runners and build up your credibility as a performance brand.

Early on, the trio considered the name Neon for their company, eventually whittling it down to its second syllable. Later, a product tester came back from a run saying she felt like she was running on clouds. The entrepreneurs ran with it, as it were. They called their patented shoe design CloudTec. Their first model, named Cloudsurfer, featured a clean, minimalist upper with what looked like five rows of not-quite-flattened rigatoni grafted on the bottom—the individual “clouds.”

Allemann struggled to persuade factories in Asia to manufacture this funny-looking sole at the quality and scale they wanted. Yet the orders mounted. The three founders needed help professionalizing and growing their tiny business, so Coppetti recruited a snowboarding friend, Marc Maurer, to join them. At the time, Maurer was head of business development and marketing for Valora Retail, which ran a chain of convenience stores in Central Europe similar to 7-Eleven. He approached his own boss, the company’s finance chief, Martin Hoffmann. The bad news, he told him, was that he was leaving for a shoe startup in Zurich. The good news? It was looking for a CFO.

Maurer and Hoffmann bought stakes in On in 2013 and joined the three founders as equal partners. Among their first strategic decisions was that Hoffmann should relocate to Portland, Oregon, Nike’s backyard. Britt Olsen, a skiing and mountain biking addict who’d recently departed another Portland startup, joined as On’s head of North America marketing. Olsen had been looking for something entrepreneurial, but with less of the American hustle-and-grind vibe, and she got the sense there was something different about this little European enterprise. Its owners weren’t simply looking for rapid growth. “What’s happened in the past when I worked for companies that were, you know, early startup, VC-funded seed money, it’s raise, raise, raise, raise, raise, raise, raise, raise, raise,” she says. “But where’s the proof?”

In early meetings, Olsen and her few fellow American colleagues tended to be the aggressive ones, arguing that On could rapidly expand and maybe even topple Nike one day. The Europeans were more circumspect. Then, one day in early 2016, Maurer and the three founders flew to Portland for a weekend strategizing session with Hoffmann, who’d rented a house on the Oregon coast. In the previous year, On’s revenues had reached about $30 million—which Nike generated approximately every eight hours—and the executives were nervous about whether they could keep that growth going. Should they play it safe and pursue the slow, steady pace of a niche running brand? Or should they aim big, expanding into other sports and targeting the feet of millions of people? Above all, were all five of them still interested in being entrepreneurial lifers—or did they want to cash out and return to their old lives?

On the drive to the house, Hoffmann pulled off the highway and took his partners through a suburb to One Bowerman Dr., the entrance of Nike’s global headquarters in Beaverton. The Europeans climbed out of the car and feasted their eyes on the Swoosh’s vast, grandiose grounds, the skillful result of spending decades catering to the needs of athletes and the whims of the general public. Nike, also once a niche running brand, hadn’t just expanded into other sports; it had become a cultural icon, alongside legends whose names now graced the buildings of its campus: Pete Sampras, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.

By the end of the weekend, they’d made their decision. They were going for it.
On popped up on Ken Fox’s radar in 2013. His private equity firm, Stripes LLC, was particularly interested in brands with obsessive followings; it would eventually go on to back the organic Los Angeles grocer Erewhon, the indie film darling A24 and the cult cookie chain Levain, among other companies. Fox had been scoping out the sneaker industry, convinced there was room for a challenger brand to Nike and Adidas.

At the time, On had yet to open a store in the US or launch a significant marketing campaign. Its sneakers were available at other retailers, and people were mostly finding out about them through grassroots marketing, which consisted of arming local brand ambassadors in key cities with free merch, sponsoring local 5K races and working closely with the owners of specialty running stores—the same ones Coppetti had been chatting up. When this worked well, a store manager would talk with a runner who’d come in looking for, say, another pair of Nikes. “You know, if you like the Nike Pegasus,” the manager might say, “you might want to try on a pair of On Clouds.”

But unlike North American brands such as Under Armour or Lululemon, which began growing in a vast domestic market before even contemplating expansion to the rest of the world, On was from a tiny European country and knew it had to expand globally and fast. While the Cloud model introduced in 2014 was technically a running shoe—Swiss triathlete Nicola Spirig won silver at the Rio Olympics in a pair—the model was catching on with casual wearers in the German-speaking world.

In 2016, Fox finally reached out to Hoffmann. The On partners saw something unique in the investor. “As a startup consumer brand, we got offered money from either West Coast venture firms, who are all about your tech and how fast you can build your direct-to-consumer offering, or East Coast private equity who want to build a traditional consumer product,” co-founder Allemann told Bloomberg in 2021. “Stripes is both.” Fox was surprised to discover that On had five partners and no CEO—a unique setup, he would later conclude, that gave the company a much richer pool of executive brainpower than typical businesses still chasing $100 million in annual sales. The partners were highly collaborative and focused on grooming newcomers to the industry. “It’s just a kind of extraordinary talent factory, where you had people really develop and grow,” says Fox, whose firm invested $60 million for a roughly 18% stake in 2017. (Hoffmann and Maurer eventually became co-CEOs in January 2021.)

Then On experienced a sort of only-in-Switzerland windfall. Another early investor was a fund backed by billionaire investment banker Jorge Paulo Lemann, who has a home on Lake Zurich. At the time, Lemann was letting tennis star Roger Federer use his grass court to get in shape for Wimbledon. In the summer of 2018, Federer ended his contract with Nike and before long agreed to meet for dinner in Zurich with the On partners, who, incidentally, had noticed photos on social media of Federer’s wife, Mirka, wearing Ons. When Federer visited On’s campus—known as On Labs, which along with a sleek office includes a skunkworks filled with sneaker components and cobbling machines—the partners put him on a treadmill in a pair of Cloudsurfers. He had told them he could stay for only 20 minutes, but didn’t end up leaving for several hours. Soon Federer was on board to buy a stake in the company and help champion its entry into tennis, replete with a new line called the Roger.

After the pandemic hit, the sneaker-verse was booming—particularly Nike. Resale markets such as StockX had turned its models into a new asset class, its lines such as Dunks were selling out, and the company’s profitable new strategy was to cut out middlemen retailers and sell directly to fans. Nike began devoting more design energy to its lifestyle models instead of performance lines and reduced or halted the flow of sneakers to all sorts of popular chains, from Foot Locker and DSW to department stores like Macy’s and specialty running stores including Fleet Feet.

In 2021, still growing by about 70% a year, On surged to $800 million in sales. It had launched in China, opened a flagship store in New York and reached a new milestone—selling 10 million pairs of shoes in a single year. The five partners decided to take the company public. Fox put On in touch with bankers and investors, hoping the initial public offering would be as much about freeing up new capital as raising the profile of the still largely under-the-radar brand. Instead, the timing coincided with another wave of Covid-19, which shut sneaker factories across Asia, snarled global shipping and made air freight more expensive. On’s stock whipsawed for the first 24 months, which was slightly better than the S&P 500 index and far superior to Nike, whose troubles from its new strategy began mounting.

Meanwhile, Federer as the face of On as a performance brand was not going as planned. He was supposed to compete in majors, but he reinjured his knee after joining the company and managed to play only a small number of largely uncompetitive matches in 2021. The tennis star was on a couch in On’s office in 2022 when he announced his retirement on Instagram. The public started viewing him as a lifestyle figure and, with it, On as a lifestyle brand.

This was exacerbating a conundrum for the company, which wanted to be taken seriously as an athletic player but was being embraced for its fashionable comfort. On Clouds had become ubiquitous in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but as the go-to shoe for doctors, nurses, restaurant workers and seniors. A similar situation played out in Japan.

Fearing that On could lose its sports cred, in 2023 the partners began removing its products from some 200 locations across those smaller European markets swooning over the brand’s orthopedic benefits. Sure, it would sacrifice some sales, but by then most of On’s growth was happening in the US, and it needed to stay in control of the brand’s image. It soon introduced a new version of the Roger performance tennis shoe (now one of its top-performing lines) and signed contracts with young players heading into their prime. It also rolled out new hiking and running shoe lines, including one with a maximalist chunky sole that aimed at rival upstart Hoka. The various models were designed for different types of runners, who On hoped would lock onto a certain franchise for years to come. “We started to turn around the messaging,” Maurer says.

Also around this time, Nike’s strategy to pull out of retailers was proving to be a massive miscalculation. Not only had its customers lost interest in its lifestyle offerings—with no new performance-oriented products to replace them—novel brands filled the stores it had abandoned. In 2022, Foot Locker had 10 million new customers in the US, with On and Hoka driving twice as much of that traffic as competitors. Nike’s fumble, says Hoffman, is one reason why “On and Hoka exist today.”

Finn Bremner, who manages the Brooklyn Running Co. store in the New York City borough’s Park Slope neighborhood, knows exactly what to say to customers who walk in asking about “QC” shoes. Obviously, he says, they’re referring to On, whose logo features a curiously shaped “O” with a hash mark on top and an extraordinarily sans-serif lowercase “n.” (If you google “QC shoes,” you’ll find On’s website.) At nearby Prospect Park, Aviel Fradkine, a 24-year-old social worker, says he tried to buy a pair online, but it took him a while to find them. “I wasn’t entering the right letters.”

Aware of this logo confusion, On has an explanation that, at least to executives, makes perfect sense. The tick at the top of the O is meant to evoke a light switch, explains Maurer, who stands up excitedly to demonstrate his point. Since On’s soles create a feeling of instability, they force you to activate underutilized muscles. “You stand more upright in an On,” he says, his knees bent slightly, as if he’s ready to bound to the top of the company’s 17-story office tower. “It feels like you’re being switched on.” Maurer points out there was a time when consumers didn’t recognize Nike’s logo either. “Everyone knows the Swoosh,” he says. “But they needed to establish that over a long period of time.”

Unlike most startup consumer brands, On made the early decision not to raise tons of money to pour into marketing. “For us it was important to not push ourselves in people’s face just with spending money,” Maurer says. It enabled On to become profitable earlier than many startups and allowed the five partners to retain a controlling stake in the company, which they still hold today.

But they’ve finally decided to throw cash at some of that brand confusion in the form of a very expensive endorser—Zendaya. In June, On signed a major partnership with the actor-singer, who brings with her 180 million Instagram followers, many of whom are young and female, just one of the key growth segments for the company. On quickly posted a series of short videos of the film star, including one where she zips down a summer toboggan run in the Swiss Alps in On shoes and workout gear. “I used to be really bad at trying new things,” Zendaya says, before plunging down the winding course. When she emerges at the bottom, she smiles and says: “OK, I’m not so bad.”

It’s clearly more of a play to woo anyone with feet—not hardcore runners—and risks undercutting the brand’s reputation with the latter. Yet On says that its relationship with athletes remains critical. The company carefully tracks what shoes runners are wearing on popular trails around the world to assess whether it’s gaining share (it says it is). “We want to be the No. 1 brand for running,” Olsen says. “If we do not succeed at that, nothing else works.” But its status is still a work in progress. In July, when high-end running chain Fleet Feet released data culled from its 273 US stores, On came in third, after Hoka and Brooks, among the top-performing brands in the past year. Hoka had three of the top 10 shoe models, and Brooks had four. On had none.

Still, at a running and outdoorwear retail conference in Austin in November, On impressed crowds with its pipeline of new products, including a racing shoe for recreational runners called the Cloudboom Max, which will sell for $230 starting in August. The brand had one of the busiest booths at the show, often getting more attention than Nike, according to BTIG analyst Stichter. Both Foot Locker Inc. and Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. recently signaled they want to stock even more of On’s merchandise. “On and Hoka have done an amazing job driving running business and really leaning into performance run and reinventing the category,” Dick’s CEO Lauren Hobart said at a Morgan Stanley conference in December. Even with Nike retooling its running offerings and repairing its relationship with retailers, she added, the Swoosh probably won’t cannibalize On’s new customers.

That kind of momentum comes with its own challenges. Last spring, On failed to handle the ballooning traffic at its biggest US warehouse, in Atlanta, slowing order fulfillment. The situation briefly spooked investors, who feared On was struggling to keep up with its own growth. The company says the problem is under control, in part thanks to an increased use of automation at the facility. “This is a normal growing pain,” Hoffmann says. “The team very quickly reacted and mitigated.”
On’s co-CEO is also pushing for a more measured growth rate. In October 2023 he told investors that On would rather slow from its roughly 50% expansion each year to a more sustainable 26% growth through 2026, and then by as little as 20%. Currently, Wall Street analysts expect On to bring in $10 billion in annual sales by 2033, a milestone that neither Lululemon Athletica Inc. nor Puma SE—despite its 77 years of experience—has ever reached.

To achieve it, On wants to ratchet up its China business, open more stores and finally become a real player in apparel, where it’s failed in the past. The company originally launched a high-priced line of running and athleisure wear in 2016, but it fizzled. It’s more recently poached apparel designers from Nike and Adidas and relaunched its clothing line—selling everything from a $2,350 parka designed in partnership with LVMH’s Loewe to lightweight $150 running shorts. It will eventually need to expand into another sport, too, and nothing is off the table, says Hoffmann—including saturated, hypercompetitive categories long controlled by Nike and Adidas, like basketball and soccer. “Many markets are actually craving for another brand to come in because they’ve been dominated by a few players for quite a long time,” he says.

Which will mean developing the next great sneaker. On a recent morning at On’s headquarters, the company was showing off its LightSpray technology. Typically, shoe uppers are stitched and glued together from dozens of components at multiple production sites. LightSpray churns out versions of a single piece, like a sock. A robotic arm held out a model of a foot with the On sole affixed, then steadily rotated it in circles as a gun sprayed material, like a spider building its web. A few minutes later, the technician removed the finished product and put it in a second machine, whose robotic limbs applied finish and colors. The finished sneaker was lightweight and surprisingly tough. It also lacked laces, forcing you to shove your foot in to get it on.

The whole thing comes off a bit more like sneaker theater than the future of sports, but Bernhard—who originally tinkered with that garden hose and old Nikes—insists it’s not. On has already sold versions of the shoe, known as the Cloudboom Strike LS, to hardcore runners for about $330 apiece. By 2027, the company says, it could start scaling up production for the masses and theoretically turn the machines into a fully automated production line located in Switzerland or the US, rather than Vietnam. “We embrace impossible,” Bernhard says. “We will always do that.”