On Running

“On in five years will be a global sports brand that still very much resonates with our core community, with runners, but also has built a second sport called tennis, and is happening for you on the full body. So not only shoes, but very much also apparel, beca…”

“If you look at our senior leadership team now today, these are roughly 10 people. Half of them are female. So actually all the regions D to C is all in female hands at On”

“At the beginning people told us, don't do that, that you need the running shoe bling because that's gonna put you at a disadvantage and we did it anyhow. And so at first it probably was almost a little bit an inhibitor but it made it to a very distinctive desi…”

“I feel doing something to perfection in many cases beats kind of optimizing for efficiency, especially when it comes to product. Not always true, but as somebody who's very much focused on product, I'm more 120%.”

“But how about not us giving you money, but you giving us money and becoming a co-investor and a co-entrepreneur together with us and To our surprise, Roger said, yes, that's what I'm gonna do.”

“Probably back then it probably waited a little bit long until we started to invest into on being bigger out there and being also having this cultural relevance. And so the moment where we see you switch from building a grassroot level brand, To then also build…”

“In the first month, I think we sold 50 pairs of shoes back in 2000 and 12, I believe. And so we launched this D to C presence as well.”

“In 2013 our production partners called me and said, Hey, David, we have a little problem. Just our factory went broke. So they're shut down and all the materials for Next season's production are already in there, but they haven't been assembled. And so that wa…”

“Fredrik von Lirde one of the top talents and contenders For the Ironman triathlon on Kona for the world championships he wore our shoe and it was a prototype. So Olivier was always cycling behind him on the running route because Olivier was afraid that the sho…”

“We as founders probably spend 40, 50 days per year in the lab and together with an amazing team, we're trying to always shave off again as well.”

“We had asked Thilo because he's a product designer and Not a shoe designer. He had never designed a shoe. And so we felt that's a good fit with us because we also never were in the shoe business. So let's completely break conventions.”

“So people love it because it's maximizing the interaction time and not the transaction time.”

“Between the two of us, our market shares are still relatively small globally. There's so, so much potential for both brands to do incredibly well.”

“Well, traditionally, they're very loyal, you know, and it's hard to get a consumer that was running in ASICs for 10 years or Saucony for 10 years to switch brands. I think that's changing dramatically. I think people are open to trying different brands now. An…”

“And so it's the smaller parts that have a bigger impact than the hours and days and weeks we spent with a sports science team engineering a foam so that you can do your five K and not have your back hurting in the evening.”

“What is nicer about perfume is that it even costs less to make than the actual packaging, which for us is slightly different”

“Other than that, I think Light Sprays is just, her latest innovation is, is just a very interesting piece of an innovation platform that we're building out. It can be seen as controversial because you make a shoe in three minutes and you don't need any humans,…”

“So running and coming from running and having run culture as a base is just a great starting point because we simply can't fuck up. You cannot give people a product that they cannot do their half marathon in.”

“The ambition to be first helps to attract great talent. It helps to bring in engineers. It helps to bring in innovators. And it gives you clarity in your roadmap to what you're doing.”

“Every great product, you should probably trigger somewhat of that slight discomfort of challenging yourself of, is it the right thing for me?”

“We tried really hard to be probably overly precise in the product that we do, and that means that engineering is slightly slower, and you should leave a bit more to the consumer or the runner in that case to make up their minds. We're striving for perfection, …”

“A sportswear brand that, that strives to be the most premium sportswear brand on the planet. And the word premium is in there and he's certainly part of the reasoning why we look at it that way.”

“We probably listened to customers when it comes to the space that exists between sports and lifestyle too much.”

“We did, but it didn't work.”

“This year I definitely would say it's that slow marathon running product that rightfully so probably the community didn't get, because if you have that ambition, why would you want to wear a shoe for the slower runner? Even if you are that there's a lot of hea…”

“We probably would have explored different materials earlier, whereas I think we took a very conscious decision to make that a vegan product for all the sustainability reasons behind it, where then durability is sort of the other side of the equation. And we pr…”