The On Running Story: From a Garden Hose Prototype to a Billion-Dollar Brand

In 2009, a retired Swiss endurance athlete glued strips of a garden hose to the bottom of a running shoe. It sounds like a garage experiment because it was one. A little over a decade later, that experiment had become a publicly traded company worth billions of dollars, with Roger Federer as a partner and its shoes on feet all over the world. This is the story of On, and it is a masterclass in how the brands we love in this industry actually get built.

We nerd out on this stuff at Malakye, not just the product, but the machine behind it: the people, the jobs, and the leaps of faith that turn an idea into an empire. On is one of the best examples out there.

The garden-hose prototype

The spark came from Olivier Bernhard, a former professional runner with a serious resume. Bernhard was a multiple-time Ironman champion and a three-time world duathlon champion before he retired from competition. According to On's company history, when Bernhard set out to build a running shoe with a completely new feel, he started experimenting by gluing pieces of garden hose to the outsole of a shoe prototype in 2009. Crude as it was, the idea worked: it delivered a soft landing and an explosive push-off. That experiment became the foundation for On's patented CloudTec cushioning, the row of hollow tubes you can still spot on the sole of every pair today.

Why the product actually won

Plenty of people have a clever idea in a garage. What made On different is that the idea solved a real problem in a way runners could feel immediately. Traditional running shoes forced a trade-off: soft cushioning that felt mushy and slow, or firm foam that felt fast but punished your joints. Bernhard's hollow-tube concept, which became CloudTec, aimed to give you both at once, a cushioned landing that then locks firm for the push-off. That single insight, cushioning on impact and support on take-off, is the entire reason the brand exists, and it is a reminder that the best products are not the flashiest, they are the ones that fix something real.

From there, On leaned hard into design and storytelling. The look was clean and unmistakably Swiss, the marketing was premium, and the brand refused to compete on price or discounting the way so many shoe companies do. It built desire instead of chasing volume, and it protected that positioning obsessively. That discipline is a lesson in itself for anyone who works in branding, merchandising, or product.

Three founders, $150,000 each, and one hard rule

An idea is not a company. What turned Bernhard's prototype into a business was two more people and a serious commitment. In January 2010, Bernhard teamed up with David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti to formally found On. Per the company's history, each of the three founders invested $150,000 of their own money, and they agreed to forfeit their shares if they took another job within the next three years. That last part is the tell. They removed their own safety net on purpose, because they knew the only way to build something great was to be all the way in.

That is skin in the game, and it is the same mindset that separates people who talk about their dream and people who go build it.

The Roger Federer leap

On grew fast on the strength of the product, but a defining moment came in 2019, when tennis legend Roger Federer joined the company as a co-entrepreneur and investor. As Business of Fashion documented, Federer became a partner in the brand and helped shape it, eventually lending his name to a full line of footwear, The Roger. It was not a celebrity endorsement in the usual sense. It was a partner betting on a company he believed in, and it put a global spotlight on a brand that was still young.

Going public

The proof of how far the garden-hose idea had come arrived in September 2021, when On went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ONON. According to SGB Media's coverage of the offering, On completed an initial public offering that generated roughly $858 million in gross proceeds, and the brand carried an estimated market value of about $7.3 billion at its debut. In just over a decade, three friends and a hose had built one of the hottest sportswear companies on the planet, and it has only grown from there.

What a story like this means for your career

Here is why we tell these stories. A company does not go from three founders to billions of dollars on product alone. It takes a full machine to get there: designers and product developers to build the shoes, materials and supply-chain people to source and make them, marketers and brand builders to tell the story, sales and retail teams to put them on shelves, plus finance, operations, e-commerce, and customer service holding it all together. Every single one of those is a job, and every one of those jobs was filled by a real person who found their way in.

Think about everything that had to happen between the garden-hose prototype and the New York Stock Exchange. Someone had to turn a rough concept into a manufacturable outsole. Someone had to source materials, build supplier relationships overseas, and manage quality at scale. Someone had to design the packaging, run the e-commerce site, build the wholesale accounts, negotiate the Federer partnership, manage the finances through an IPO, and answer customer emails when an order went sideways. On employs thousands of people across all of those functions today. None of them were the founder gluing hose to a shoe, and every one of them was essential.

That is the lesson. The brands you admire were built by people who understood the machine and took a leap to be part of it. If a company like On excites you, do not just admire it from the outside. Study how it is built, figure out where your skills fit, and go find the humans inside it. That is exactly what Malakye is for. We have connected the action sports, outdoor, and lifestyle industries with their people since 2002, so you can see the real companies and the real people behind them, not just a logo. Explore the companies shaping the industry, watch the jobs board, and when you find a brand that lights you up the way On lit up three Swiss founders, go build your own version of that story.