How a Young Swiss Brand Out-Marketed Nike and Adidas on a Fraction of the Budget.
By Creatives Takeover Editorial Team · September 30, 2026
A closer look at the strategy behind On’s remarkable rise.
On's origin story does not sound like the beginning of a company that would one day sit behind only Nike and Adidas in global footwear value. Its founders, working in Zurich in 2010, strapped garden hose pipes to the bottom of a traditional running shoe, experimenting with a completely different cushioning sensation than anything on the market. That crude prototype eventually became CloudTec, the distinctive pod-shaped cushioning visible along the sole of every On shoe today, a design so recognizable it functions as a walking billboard whether the wearer is running a marathon or just picking up coffee.
Co-founder David Allemann, who had previously worked at a furniture design brand and spent time consulting before starting On, has been direct about what the company did not have in its early years: money. "We've been a discovering brand from the start," he said. "So we didn't have a lot of marketing money." That constraint did not become an excuse. It became the entire strategic premise the brand was built around.
The Endorsement That Started Backwards
Most athletic brands build a celebrity partnership the conventional way: identify a star, negotiate a fee, sign a contract. On's relationship with Roger Federer worked in the opposite direction. The company noticed Federer was already wearing On shoes on his own, before any partnership existed. Federer, at the time, was navigating a genuinely difficult exit from Nike, a brand he had been signed to since age 13, so thoroughly identified with the swoosh that one company reportedly passed on approaching him for a partnership, reasoning simply, "He's already branded Nike."
When Federer joined On in 2019, he did not sign on as a paid face. He invested for a 3 percent equity stake, becoming a genuine owner rather than a spokesperson reciting a script written for him. That distinction shows up in the numbers: Federer's stake in On is now reportedly worth more than every paycheck he ever earned from Nike across his entire career, combined. It also shows up in the marketing itself. On and Federer went on to co-create THE ROGER, a tennis-inspired lifestyle shoe line that extended the brand into new territory without diluting its running credibility, a genuine product collaboration rather than a name licensed onto a shelf.
Refusing to Take Itself Too Seriously
The clearest evidence of On's actual brand personality shows up in how differently it behaves compared to its biggest competitors. Nike and Adidas have spent decades building campaigns around intensity, grit, and the mythology of the elite athlete pushing past limits. On has deliberately built something else entirely.
In a 2026 Super Bowl commercial, On brought in Elmo from Sesame Street to ask Roger Federer, on camera, why the brand's logo is so commonly misread as spelling "QC" instead of "On." It is a joke at the brand's own expense, addressing a real, widely shared confusion about the logo's design, delivered through arguably the most disarming possible messenger. On's chief marketing officer, Alex Griffin, described the underlying philosophy plainly: "As a performance-driven brand, we wanted to challenge the idea that success in running is defined by intensity alone." That single sentence captures the actual strategic bet On has made across nearly every campaign it runs: the entire sportswear category had converged on one emotional register, and there was real room to win by sounding like something else.
The Metaphor That Explains the Whole Strategy
Allemann has offered a description of this approach that captures it better than any campaign brief could: "Have a strong brand in a world of noise, it's like having the only red T-shirt in a stadium full of white ones." That image is worth sitting with directly, because it reframes what On was actually competing on. It was never trying to out-loud Nike and Adidas, two companies with marketing budgets On could not realistically match. It was trying to be the one thing in the stadium that looked nothing like everything else in it, a strategy that requires distinctiveness, not volume.
That same instinct shows up in On's product choices, not just its advertising. The company's 2026 launch of a $300 spray-on shoe, built using a process that essentially sprays material directly into a finished shoe shape, generated the kind of unpaid press coverage and social sharing that a traditional product launch rarely earns on its own. A genuinely strange, headline-worthy product functions as its own marketing channel, without requiring a single dollar of media spend to get people talking about it.
Extending the Audience Without Losing the Core
On's growth has not stayed confined to serious runners, and that expansion has been handled deliberately rather than accidentally. The addition of Zendaya as a brand ambassador, alongside Federer, opened the brand to an audience far removed from competitive running, without abandoning the performance credibility that built the brand in the first place. A widely viewed tennis-themed stunt featuring both Federer and Zendaya reportedly drew more than 15 million views on Instagram and 7 million on TikTok, pulling in a meaningfully younger audience than the brand's original running-community base.
A collaboration with Loewe, the LVMH-owned luxury fashion house, pushed the brand even further into territory that has nothing to do with running performance at all, into genuine fashion credibility. Each of these moves expanded who the brand could plausibly speak to, while CloudTec, THE ROGER, and the running-specific product line kept the original, technically credible customer base intact.
What the Numbers Actually Show
None of this would matter as a business case if the underlying financial results had not followed. On's revenue grew from $330 million to $1.8 billion over the years spanning Federer's involvement and the brand personality strategy described above, a roughly fivefold increase. The company's valuation reached $19.65 billion, making it the third most valuable publicly traded footwear brand in the world, trailing only Nike and Adidas and ahead of longer-established names like Puma.
That growth arrived during a period when Nike was visibly struggling with the opposite problem. Nike's digital business fell 20 percent year over year by fiscal 2025, and wholesale shelf space the company had voluntarily abandoned in pursuit of a direct-to-consumer strategy was filled instead by On, Adidas, and New Balance, exactly the retail visibility On needed as it scaled. Nike's own product pipeline leaned heavily on retro silhouettes rather than genuine new innovation during the same stretch, while On kept shipping new cushioning technology and building headline-generating products like the spray-on shoe. Nike's stock fell more than 15 percent over the same period On's shares rose roughly 50 percent in a single year.
Why This Case Is Genuinely Instructive, Not Just Impressive
The instinct, reading a growth story this dramatic, is to credit Federer's star power as the deciding factor, and his involvement was genuinely significant. But crediting the outcome to celebrity alone misses the actual mechanism. On built a distinct, disciplined brand personality, playful rather than intense, self-deprecating rather than mythologizing, before Federer ever arrived, out of necessity rather than choice, because it genuinely lacked the marketing budget to compete any other way. Federer's arrival amplified an identity that already existed rather than creating one from scratch, and his own decision to invest rather than simply accept a fee suggests he recognized that same authentic distinctiveness before it had scaled into anything close to its current size.
A brand with a clear, consistently applied personality can extend that personality across a celebrity partnership, a Super Bowl ad, a product launch, and a luxury fashion collaboration, and have all of it read as coherent rather than scattered. A brand without that underlying discipline, throwing budget at whichever tactic seems trendiest in a given quarter, tends to produce noise instead, regardless of how much is actually spent producing it.
The lesson available to a much smaller business than On is not "get a world-famous athlete to invest in your company." It is that a genuinely distinct personality, applied consistently across every touchpoint even when there is no budget to be loud about it, is itself a competitive strategy, one that a much larger, much better-funded competitor cannot simply purchase its way past.