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Mbappé’s move made the news. The shift in how people see On started much earlier.
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On’s Market Takeover
Last month Kylian Mbappé, one of the greatest football players in the world, walked onto the pitch for Real Madrid in his usual Nike boots. Except, the famous Swoosh logo had been covered over. Nike have sponsored Mbappé since 2006, when he was just 8 years old. Still, he ended that partnership to sign with On, the Swiss running brand that has never made a football boot.
Mbappé’s normal boots and the covered up pair.
Earning the trust of serious runners
Olivier Bernhard is a three-time triathlon world champion, and was a Nike-sponsored athlete. He tried gluing pieces of garden hose to the bottom of his running shoes to give him softer landings and firmer push-offs. He pitched the idea to Nike, but they passed.
He showed it to two friends, David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti, and the three of them founded On in 2010.
They started selling it shop by shop. Coppetti cold-called speciality running stores, told the owners he happened to be in town, asked their shoe size and took them out for a run. He called those stores the places "where all the serious runners go to get the best advice", so On's first advocates were the people runners already trusted on shoes.
What started as a softer landing for an athlete racing at world level, was then sold through the shops that serve the most demanding runners. So On became the comfortable shoe serious runners trust, and that reputation is what the brand carries into new categories as it expands.
Borrowing credibility
Roger Federer left Nike in 2018, and the following year he joined On as an investor and partner. Their first shoe together, The Roger Centre Court, launched in 2020 as an individually numbered run of 1,000 pairs. By 2025 Federer became a billionaire, in part thanks to his On shares.
On carried the credibility it had earned with serious runners into tennis, and Federer's name multiplied it. In 2023 the world number one Iga Świątek and the American Ben Shelton signed with On, with Federer helping develop their shoes.
Then, On moved into fashion. They’ve made collections with Loewe, the Spanish luxury brand, which Zendaya wore through her press tour for the tennis film Challengers. She also then signed with On in 2024. This year she co-created her own collection with them, launched with a film by Spike Jonze, the director of Her, the film about falling for an AI companion that was about a decade ahead of its time (he also co-created Jackass, but that's a different story).
On's football plan has more than one person in it. Thierry Henry, the Arsenal and France great, has been working with On since late 2025 and is now its Director of Football, and Mbappé will work directly with On's product teams on the boot. It's the Federer model again, a veteran of the sport becoming a partner who helps make the product.
On has kept these partnerships few and deep. Each partner has their own credibility in one space and a real hand in the product, and their reputation compounds the one On have already built.
Holding a premium position
Key to On’s playbook is their premium positioning, partially earned through their credibility at elite competition levels, but it also comes from two other business decisions.
On's engineers built their ‘LightSpray’ system in-house. A robot arm sprays a filament into a one-piece upper, with no glue. Earlier this year they opened a second LightSpray factory to 30x their capacity. Most of their shoes don’t use this system, and it only makes the upper part so far, but it's a genuine product innovation and a first step towards owning more of how their shoes get made.
On also protect their pricing. They stay away from discounting, which former CEO Martin Hoffmann called "a significant competitive advantage". Nike and Adidas both leant hard on performance marketing and discounts, and in 2024 Nike's CEO Elliott Hill said "we've become far too promotional". In 2019 Adidas admitted it had been putting 77% of its budget into performance marketing and only 23% into brand (research says the ideal split is 40% performance, 60% brand).
No one wants to be second-tier
Nike's impressive athlete roster has cost it before. In 2013, basketball star Stephen Curry left for Under Armour. His father, who was in the meeting with Nike, told ESPN "They have certain tiers of athletes. They have Kobe, LeBron and Durant, who were their three main guys. If he signed back with them, we're on that second tier". In 2024 Barcelona's teenage winger Lamine Yamal left Nike for Adidas, explaining that "at Nike, there's Kylian Mbappé and there's Vinícius Júnior". For these future best-in-the-world players, being the hero face of a smaller brand is an obvious choice over being second-tier at Nike.
The boot has to earn it
Federer joined a small running brand and helped it expand into tennis. Mbappé is joining a publicly listed company worth more than US$10 billion, and he's being asked to do the same thing in football, the most contested category in sportswear.
On walks into football with a lot already built, from its credibility with serious runners to its reach in fashion. Its standing in football itself is still borrowed, from Mbappé and Henry. You can only capitalise on a cultural moment that your brand already stands for, and in football On is still building that from scratch.
That's what we’ll see when the boot is launched. It gets judged every match, on the feet of one of the best players in the world.
Get deep in one space with a product that fixes a genuine customer problem, and sell it through the people they already trust. Then bring in partners who have their own standing in an adjacent space and a stake in getting it right.
Next season, Mbappé won’t be covering the logos on his boots. He’ll be showcasing On loud and proud.
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