David Allemann, CEO of On, explains how the Swiss sports brand built a global presence from day one through innovation and digital channels. On prioritizes diversity across its team and retail concepts, treating international expansion not as an afterthought but as core to the company from the start.
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So innovation was super core, but of course it was also very much, hey, Switzerland has 7 million people. That's the greater New York area. So you can't build a global sports brand out of Switzerland. And so it was very clear to us, if you want to be a global sports brand, you have to go global from the get go. And you for sure appreciate that the world has completely changed. If you would want to do that 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it would have been impossible. But now, because we have so many digital channels to reach consumers, we have also digital channels to collaborate across different locations around the world. It's for the first time probably in the last 10 years, and we started in 2010, possible to go global in an instant. So we started out in Switzerland, but then we went to New York. And that orange rock, there is a rock that actually existed on the mountain where we did this nothing is impossible hike. And we scanned it with a laser and we transferred it to New York. And then it was 3D printed to kind of bring back that rock to the New York store. We opened that in the middle of the pandemic. So for the first few months, it was very much a local community store. But. But now there are a lot of queues in front of that store and in front of that rock. That was 2000. We started in New York or we started in the US in 2012. The store came later in the next year, in 2013. We went to Japan, we went to China. And this is a running group that I recently ran with in China because now it has become a movement of millions around the globe at on, it's also a very diverse movement. So we are now 94 different nationalities. We are across the globe in 20 different locations, 54 different languages spoken. It's pretty much an equal gender split, not just kind of on an overall team level, but also on a management on a leader level. Our P and L is firmly in female hands because our chief Commercial officer in the us, Brit, is leading the commercial drive. Our coo, Chow from China is our coo. So it's very much a very diverse team. And we feel that very diverse team is core to the innovation core of on, because diversity is really the petri dish of innovation. It's also not just people from the business side, it's engineers. It's also a lot of creative people. We chose to build our creative team, our marketing team, internally. So it's around 250 people who come from a creative background. And I can tell you there are always super, super intense debates at all, because these different perspectives, they also collide, and then we have intense discussions and. And it leads to better results. So we opened in China as well. This is the Regent street store. We're trying to innovate in retail as well. So how can you be something that is a shop, but at the same time is a little bit of a science museum as well? That is super interesting and where you can learn something. We just opened Paris. We're actually going to open a second store at the Champs Elysees in Paris, ready for the Olympics. Because, of course, that's going to be one of the most important moments in sport.
