Known to many as "On Running", On shoes are everywhere: Olympic podiums to Paris Fashion Week to corporate offices. 

Today, the Swiss company offers premium head-to-toe sportswear designed by teams of athletes and scientists. Yet as On’s product mix expands, the company risks losing focus on the elite running shoes that first won customers. 

In this episode of Behind the Business, Fortune’s Ruth Umoh visits On’s headquarters, sports science lab, and the company’s new LightSpray factory in Zurich to learn about On’s next steps into innovative new footwear, apparel and accessories.

How On is Rewriting the Rules of Running Shoes | Behind the Business

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Every world record is falling at the moment, and it is because of the technology. Nike and Adidas have dominated performance run for decades. Then on stepped to the starting line. We were kind of afraid the shoe would fall apart and she ended up winning Boston. Its sneakers appear on marathon podiums. They're also shown up in airport terminals, art fairs, and even fashion weeks. The company wants to become far more than a running shoe brand. Your identity is expressed through your body. The shoes tells you a story. It's a feeling. But as On expands into apparel and accessories, it risks losing focus on the high performance running shoes that put it on the map. The question is, can this underdog become the next great sportswear company without losing the performance DNA that made runners believe in it? The biggest risk is not to take the risk, and we said, hey, let's go all in. What's there to lose? I'm here in Zurich, Switzerland, and I'm here for a very specific reason, that is to visit On Labs, which is this building right behind me. On started as a premium shoe brand, but it has since expanded over the last 5 years into apparel and clothing, which means you're just as likely to see the brand on a running trail as you are in a museum, in an art gallery, or even a fashion show. Swiss triathlete and Ironman champion, Olivier Bernard founded on in 2010. Looking for a better running shoe, he built an early prototype by attaching pieces of a rubber hose to the soles of his sneakers. His shoe concept didn't convince investors. So Bernard, along with friends David Aleman and Casper Copetti, decided to build on themselves. Today, that garage style experiment has evolved to challenge some of the biggest names in sportswear. On has surpassed 3. billion Swiss francs at this point in annual sales. It continues to grow rapidly. What do you think is the biggest driver of the company's growth? I think the biggest driver is the product. It's the innovation. It's that field that's running on clouds, and it's not just in footwear, but now we have brought that to apparel as well, so we're really growing toe to head. This jacket was created with one of our trail athletes. Now these trail athletes are running oftentimes up to 170 kilometers with 10,000 m of elevation. Their kit has to be so precise because it is life or death. On built its reputation around running. Even today, consumers often refer to the company as On R or college shoes on clouds, but On has much bigger ambitions, namely in clothing and accessories. Its apparel business grew more than 60% last year, helped by collaborations with Zendaya and luxury fashion house Loeve. But as On broadens its reach, it has had to avoid losing the product focus that made the brand successful in the first place. It's a balancing act that has challenged even industry leaders. Is there a fear that you'd dilute the brand if you move away from being hyperfocused on the athlete? We will always remain hyperfocused on the athlete. There's room for both. It's never an or, it's an and. But now we have the runway to build this into a larger collection where we can express that performance and technical ability into these more expressive everyday silhouettes. These are not opposites, and what makes technology performance for a runner translates into comfort for everyday use. Since its 2021 IPO, A's net sales have surged nearly five times over, reaching $3.8 billion in 2025. But the company is still a fraction the size of Nike and Adidas. A's strategy is to outinnovate them, investing heavily in research to develop premium products for serious runners. On registered last year 200 patents, so it's really a drive to reinvent how we're doing footwear and how we are reshaping the technology, including manufacturing. When I think about on, I think about sports. I think about elite athletic performance. However, when I look at your growth, it's not just athletes, it's also the everyday consumer. It is nurses who want comfortable shoes when they're working. On a hospital floor, how do you navigate the two? I feel what happened over the last 20 years, 15 years is that sports really moved at the center of society, and so it has completely changed how we dress, how we navigate through our weeks and lives. We call it the movement class, and so we have the opportunity to take this secular shift and build the most premium sports brand. That's our goal in that opportunity. Welcome to our mega space. How do you go from an idea, a concept to something that's a patentable product? It always starts with a Y. We are not creating technologies for the sake of creating cool technologies. We are starting with a question we want to answer, and then we work in an interdisciplinary team. So an innovation team has sports scientists, has sports engineers, has material scientists, chemists, and polymer scientists. This is an example of light spray. So this is the light spray Club Monster 3 that just came out. Very light, very, very light. We pretty much reinvented how you do a shoe upper by having a robotic arm that spins a 1.5 kilometer filament into a shoe in 3 minutes. So what you're seeing here in Zurich is the first light spray factory. Here you see a loud plume strike light spray that's just starting the process where the robot moves the last so that this filament will go around. It takes about 3 minutes for a whole shoe to be sprayed. Compare that to a manufacturing line where you would have 20 to 300 workers going through each step, and literally I mean you can take the shoe from the robot, put it on, and go on a run. The next generation will not want to work in a footwear manufacturing side, so automation is a must. And now we are scaling these factories and we want to bring them closer to where our consumers are. That will allow us to react to trends. Right now we have a lead time of about 4 months, to maybe get that down to 2 weeks. I would imagine that you're investing heavily then in R&D. I would imagine that it's cutting at least to an extent into the operating budget. Where are you actually seeing ROI at this point with Light Spray in particular? Innovation is creating a value that consumers feel and are willing to spend on that gives us the high gross profit margin that allows us to invest more in innovation, and so it's a flywheel. We're not necessarily looking at the ROI on a per project basis, but we look at it for a very long term. This is the engine that drives us forward. Are you testing the shoe out on a runner's foot? Do you bring them to a lab and have them run and track the data and the analytics and their sled and Upstairs we have an athlete lab where we put people on the treadmill. We have about 20 high speed cameras. We have horse plates. And they wear a mask and through their breathing we can measure at a certain speed, certain heart rate, how much energy they're using. A operates a dedicated sports science and athlete testing lab located a short walk from the main office building. Equipped with high-tech treadmills, VO2 masks, and motion capture cameras, resident athletes work with researchers to benchmark shoe performance against An's own products and lead-in competitors. The 3D animation really shows the live motion of her left leg. Because we have sensors on her foot, so we can analyze the breathes, breath in, breath out, we see the heart rate, we see the VO2, so how much oxygen is used, and all of this gives us an indication towards how much energy is she's spending to keep this running speed. And what we want is we give her another shoe, she can run the same speed, but she loses less energy. Well, maybe we need to crank it up. Beyond the celebrity collaborations and cutting edge robotics, Aleman and Copeti say the company's mission is rooted in something much simpler, creating products that help more people move. Our mission is to make people move more and more freely, and so innovation and the performance technology is the means to that. We believe if people move they are more creative, they are happier. Basically movement ignites the human spirit. And so if we can just get people to feel less pain in running or feel better in yoga class or even just feel better on a stroll through Central Park, I think we have achieved that mission.