Between a leadership answer and a Paris summit, Caspar Coppetti is building the same argument: On is no longer just a performance brand chasing metrics
Caspar Coppetti’s response to questions about On’s second leadership change in a year was, on its face, a governance answer dressed as a growth pitch. He pointed to a run of guidance targets met since the company’s 2021 listing and framed the shift from Martin Hoffmann’s single-CEO structure to a co-CEO model under himself and David Allemann as continuity, not disruption, something that lived in the founders long before it lived on an org chart. What’s more interesting than the answer itself is how closely it mirrors the language On has been using everywhere else this year, including at a summit in Paris that had almost nothing to do with leadership at all.
That event, held in late June at La Gaîté Lyrique, a cultural venue rather than a trade floor, was where On unveiled its new running identity, Run On Clouds, built around four engineered sensations it calls Soft, Support, Energy and Speed. Coppetti described the goal as making running feel intuitive rather than simply high performing, and asked, somewhat pointedly, who says sensations can’t be engineered. It’s a line that belongs less to a sportswear briefing and more to a fragrance launch, and that’s likely the point. On is borrowing a vocabulary- precision, sensation, craft- that luxury has used for decades to sell restraint as expertise, and applying it to a running shoe.
The choice of venue and language does real work for the brand. It lets On talk about carbon plates and midsole foam in the same register it uses to talk about identity and feeling, and it gives the company a way to describe its run specialty investment, including expanded launch exclusives and dedicated retail education, as a partnership rather than a distribution strategy. Positioned next to Coppetti’s leadership comments, the throughline becomes clear. Whether the subject is a management change or a shoe drop, On’s instinct is to describe structural decisions in the language of craft and continuity, which reads as considered rather than reactive.
Both stories are, in the end, the same bet. On is asking the market to evaluate it on the strength of its narrative discipline as much as its numbers, and for now the growth is cooperating. The real test comes if either slows and the brand has to explain a stumble in the same rarefied language it’s been using to explain everything else.