As soon as Hellen Obiri, the Kenyan distance runner and two-time Olympic silver medalist, takes her place on the starting line of the Olympic marathon in Paris next month, she will make history — though not for the reason you may assume.
For her shoes.
See, Ms. Obiri will be wearing the Cloudboom Strike LS, a new sneaker from On, the upstart Swiss brand started in 2010. But it doesn’t look like any sneaker anyone has ever seen.
“The first time I saw the shoes, I said, ‘No,’” Ms. Obiri said. “‘I can’t run with these.’” The shoes had no laces. They had no heel cap — a hard plate at the back kept the foot in place. They were made of a weird, stretchy, plastic-y material.
“In the changing room, even my colleagues were saying, ‘It’s a joke,’” Ms. Obiri said. “They were saying, “‘You can’t use these shoes for a marathon.’”
But then she tried them in practice. Then she agreed to wear them in the Boston Marathon in April. Then she won. And then, said Nils Altrogge, the director of innovation, technology and research for On, “She wouldn’t give them back.”
The shoe was created from a single semi-translucent synthetic monofilament almost a mile long that was extruded by a robot arm, engineered to fit to Ms. Obiri’s feet to help her run in the most effective way and then heat-fused to a foam rubber and carbon-fiber sole. It is called the Cloudboom Strike LS — LS stands for LightSpray, the trademarked name of the technology — and it weighs a mere 170 grams, or about six ounces. It has 75 percent less impact on the environment than a traditional sneaker, according to On. And when it comes to style, it has more in common with an alien bedroom slipper than any running shoe.
Think of it as the Tesla of the sneaker world. On is hoping the Cloudboom Strike LS will have the same disruptive effect on the sneaker market that Elon Musk’s innovation had on the car world. If so, On will upend not just design conventions, but the whole sneaker business model.
Spray-On Shoes Get Their Glow-Up
Every once in a while, the sneaker market is reinvented, because of leaps in design or technology or both. It happened in 1979 with Nike Air Tech and in 1982 with the Air Force 1. It happened with the Adidas Yeezys in 2015. And it happened with the Nike Vaporfly and the introduction of carbon plates in 2017.
On began thinking it could change the market again in 2020, when one of its team members was at the Milan Design Fair and saw a student presentation that featured a shoe made with a hot-glue gun.
If this sounds like a scene from the children’s film “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” in which Flint Lockwood invents spray-on elastic biopolymer adhesive shoes (or even the spray-on Coperni dress worn by Bella Hadid at Paris Fashion Week in 2022), that is understandable. Unlike those inventions, though, the Cloudboom Strike LS can be easily removed and reworn.
Fast-forward five years and that student, Johannes Voelchert, is a senior lead of innovation concept design at On, and the process he began has culminated in a paradigm shift.
Rather than the usual 150 to 200 components of a running shoe, the Cloudboom Strike LS has only seven. Rather than being touched by about 100 people on an assembly line, it is touched, on average, by one. Rather than being put together by patternmakers, it is created using parametric design principles, and computational engineering.
Rather than the fabric being dyed, color is added via inkjet. Rather than the production being outsourced to factories in Asia — in On’s case, in Indonesia and Vietnam — and then shipped around the world, the Cloudboom Strike LS will be made by new “production cells” in Zurich and in On’s other markets.
That means that the time between production and delivery is much shorter. (The Cloudboom Strike LS goes from midsole to finished product in three minutes.) It also means that there is no waste on the cutting-room floor — no leftover materials or toxic glue to be thrown away — and significantly fewer carbon emissions. There should also be less stock left at the end of every season because the shoe is made closer to demand. And because the filament is a thermoplastic, the upper can be melted down and reused at the end of a shoe’s life cycle.
“It’s really jumping into the future when it comes to manufacturing,” Marc Maurer, the co-chief executive of On, said. When asked about the implications for the supply chain and the people who will no longer be necessary, he said, essentially, that automation and repurposing are the story of industry.
Because the shoe is created by a robot that has been programmed to weave the filament more or less densely in different areas depending on the biomechanics of the foot and the need for support and breathability, the company has had to build the machines from scratch — an enormous financial and philosophical bet.
“Whenever you try to fundamentally redesign an industry, there’s obviously huge costs that come with that,” said Eric Hullegie, a senior lead of innovation concept design for On.
The challenge is to make it pay off. “We know the shoe is very fast,” Mr. Maurer said. “We know it’s superlight. What we don’t know is whether people will like it.”
The iPhone Effect
The Cloudboom Strike LS is not the lightest shoe on the market — the Saucony Sinister is a mere 149 grams (about five ounces), the Merrell Vapor Glove 6 is 5.5 ounces and the Nike ZoomX Streakfly is six ounces — but it is among them. Still, sneakers, more than any other piece of athletic equipment, have come to represent both cool and community signaling. The popular verdict is not simply performative, but emotional.
Among sneakerheads, weirdness and efficacy and first-past-the-post adoption are their own currency. A bizarre but signature look may work for them.
“We had a huge internal debate on the look,” Mr. Maurer said. “But you take an example like the iPhone and think about what phones looked like before and then what they looked like afterward.”
That sounds like hubris, but the iPhone is not a random comparison. The Cloudboom Strike LS isn’t intended just for elite athletes but for everyone. On intends to take it “from a pure performance product to something that you can sell in millions of pairs to an all-day consumer,” Mr. Mauer said, adding that his goal was to double the revenue from 2023, which was approximately 1.8 billion Swiss francs, in the next three years.
The Olympics will be the shoe’s global debut. Some shoes will be commercially available at that time, but the Cloudboom Strike LS won’t be on sale widely until the fall, around the time of the New York City Marathon. At $330, it is at the upper end of the sneaker market, more than Off-White x Nike Air Force 1s or Yeezys, though significantly less than fashion sneakers, which can cost about $1,100 for, say, Balenciaga kicks.
It is also a road shoe, not a track shoe. The plan is to expand the technology to sneakers specifically engineered for other sports, including tennis. Roger Federer is an investor in On and a contributing product designer.
Before that, however, all eyes will be on Paris — and Ms. Obiri. She is excited about her new gear. “When you trust the shoes, you have that mentality, like, ‘I’m going to run fast,’” she said.
Also, said Ilmarin Heitz, On’s senior director of innovation, “the psychological advantage of knowing ‘I have something no one else has’ is an amazing feeling at the starting line of very, very important races.”
If On’s dreams come true, it will not be Ms. Obiri’s advantage alone for very long.
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