‘Premium’ as a superpower
Athletic shoe brand On aims to put itself at the pinnacle of the premium market, and stay there. It is innovation that will drive this ambition.
All successful companies need to have a vision. Swiss athletic footwear brand On describes its vision in a straightforward enough way, although that does not mean its ambitions will be easy to achieve. It wants to be the most premium sportswear brand in the world.
Chief executive, Martin Hoffmann, who has called On’s premium status the brand’s superpower, accepts that even understanding exactly what this means is difficult. “Premium is something brands can talk about at length,” he says, “but, ultimately, it is something that you experience as a customer. It is an emotion that we all, as customers, can have towards a brand.” For customers to perceive any brand as premium means they desire that brand’s products, he suggests. Once they have acquired those products, they might feel this boosts their (the customers’) identity, and that this is something worth paying a premium for. “Our task is to curate this feeling with the customer,” Mr Hoffmann explains.
Set apart
Inevitably, a question comes to mind as to how you “curate this feeling”. Clearly, you cannot do it by offering what the mass-market offers, only at a difficult-to-justify higher price. You have to set yourself apart from the mass-market, the On chief executive insists.
“There is a lot of competition in the mass-market,” he adds. “And, in any case, Switzerland is not good at building mass-market brands. We have to chart our own path, and not just fish in the same pond as everyone else. On has to do this by growing brand awareness and by bringing to market products that customers will find exciting, leading with innovation.”
Born into running
There are stand-out examples of bringing innovation to market in recent running shoes that the brand has developed. Mr Hoffmann makes no apology for this focus on the company’s core segment. “We were born into running and we want to stay relevant in running,” he says. “We still have an aspiration to be the leader in running.”
He talks about the company’s Cloud shoes almost as though the various ranges were businesses in their own right. There are Cloudmonster, Cloudultra, Cloudsurfer and Cloudrunner collections; they are, to use his phrase “amazing franchises”. There will be updates in at least two categories of Cloud in the course of 2026.
The age of superfoams
One forthcoming product that exemplifies the Swiss company’s commitment to innovation is the Cloudsurfer3. Production of this shoe combines the LightSpray technology that the company introduced in 2024, plus a proprietary cushioning system called CloudTec, and a new proprietary superfoam called Surreal. On’s claim is that using CloudTec and Surreal results in a “significantly greater” impact absorption than the foam alone can deliver.
“We are seeing a lot of innovation around foams,” Mr Hoffmann explains, “and being able to combine the foam we have developed with our engineering ability is to bring CloudTec into the age of superfoams.”
For its part, LightSpray is revolutionising the way the company makes its products, he continues. It involves using a robotic arm to spin the upper of a shoe in a single step. The company is now preparing to launch LightSpray-made shoes that the chief executive says will be “relevant to everyday runners”, as well as to high-level athletes. These will be available in March.
Visibility through apparel
But running is only one part of the On business. There is what he calls “massive growth” in products for training, especially in collections for women aged between 18 and 35. And the brand is aiming to expand in tennis, which is appropriate as it names Roger Federer as one of its “co-entrepreneurs”. The 20-time Grand Slam champion first invested in On in 2019. The company is also excited about growth in the popularity of its apparel collections and here, too, tennis is becoming increasingly important. “Tennis is our fastest growing apparel segment,” Martin Hoffmann says. “Tennis makes apparel extremely visible, on court and off.”
The sports it finds most attractive are those that lie at the intersection of performance and lifestyle, he explains. His view is that the lines between performance and lifestyle are now blurring, with some sports apparel becoming high fashion and people moving seamlessly from sports activity and exercise to other aspects of their lives. On has an opportunity to stand out, he insists, because of the “design DNA and innovation DNA” that it has. In apparel this will mean high levels of functionality and comfort, but with “much more styling” than other brands.
A different kind of profit warning
Martin Hoffmann is also the chief finance officer of On. The company went public in 2021 with its shares trading not on the SIX Swiss Exchange in its home city of Zurich, but in New York. He has overseen a doubling of revenues in the past three years. In the final quarter of its current financial year, it expects full-year revenues of almost 3 billion Swiss francs (around $3.75 billion), growth of 34% year on year. The world of finance is also impressed by its projection that profit margins will increase by more than 60% in this financial year.
Mr Hoffmann plays this down. Investors are important, but he says he is wary of pushing margin-growth too far. If you have high margins it can be an indication of strong growth. Alternatively, high margins can also mean that a company has run out of ideas and no longer knows what to spend its money on. “We still have a lot of ideas and a lot of big dreams,” Mr Hoffmann says. “Our philosophy is to increase our margins steadily, to keep doing the right things, to keep investing in the brand and in our team, and to continue to be a growth company.”
Another superpower
Ongoing investment in product quality and innovation are crucial to any company seeking to do this. Otherwise, he warns, customers, at some point, will “see through it” and question why a brand is asking them to pay a premium, while delivering the same quality as the mass-market. “A high gross-profit margin can be risky,” he insists. “You have to find the right balance.”
Investment in people is also of great importance and this, in his opinion, is something that the footwear industry as a whole often underestimates. Strong financial results and successful products are the result of the people a company has brought on board; other assets help, but it is people who make the magic work. On hired 600 people in 2025; it received a total of 200,000 applications for these positions. At the time of writing, it gives the very precise total of its employees as 4,286. Martin Hoffmann is happy that the company is attracting talent, calling this “another superpower”.
Automation push
The company’s success in growing revenues and margins in the current financial year has come at a time of widespread tariff tensions and what observers refer to as “the politicisation of trade”, and even as “the weaponisation of supply chains”. Mr Hoffmann says On has tried to absorb much of the tariff pain so far, and has been able to do so without reducing its ability to invest in the business and in innovation.
If this particular cloud has a silver lining, Mr Hoffmann suggests that the tariffs may have encouraged many brands to invest in automating production. Much as he values human talent, he believes this to be a good thing. Automation is an important tool for addressing costs and he says the whole performance footwear sector must push towards greater automation. “Our industry is seriously lagging behind when it comes to automation,” he says. “This does not necessarily mean shifting manu-facturing closer to target markets. It will just make us more independent in the face of all kinds of impacts. We cannot rely on manual labour being cheap enough to continue running the old business model.”
On says it was “born into running” and is intent on remaining relevant among running enthusiasts. Credit: ON
