On: In-House Content / Brand Studio
On was born in the Swiss Alps in 2010 with one goal: to revolutionize the sensation of running by empowering everyone to run on clouds. Today, On delivers industry-disrupting innovation in premium footwear, apparel, and accessories for high-performance running, outdoor, and all-day activities. Driven by peer recommendation, On’s award-winning CloudTec® innovation, purposeful design and groundbreaking strides in sportswear’s circular economy have attracted a fast-growing global fan base — inspiring humans to explore, discover and Dream On.
Achievements? Ok here goes:
Launched OFF – our first print publication, sold internationally.
Brought live content to the On YouTube channel for the first time.
Elevated storytelling for On’s groundbreaking innovations. This includes creating a standout tone of voice for the launch of Cyclon – the world’s first recyclable shoe subscription – and bespoke multimedia landing pages for Roger Federer’s first tennis shoe.
Explained complex tech in a clear and engaging way with a multimedia approach – from video series to in-depth articles.
Increased representation in our content, and celebrated diversity with our “Every Runner” series. Partnerships with run crews like LGBTQI+ community OUT-FIT and the body-positive Pansa Boyz raised important discussions within the running community.
Reached new audiences with concepts like “Style Stories” series, bridging the gap between sports, fashion and lifestyle.
We also launched (and lived) a new brand mission, to “Dream On”.
Oh, and we played a pivotal role in the next chapter of On’s growth with investor comms for an IPO.
All this while providing collateral for our E-commerce team to drive sales and maintaining a consistent brand aesthetic and voice.
Yeah, it’s been quite a year…
Goals
The On Content team mission is to tell stories that encourage people to run, explore and find new ways to move.
To do that in 2021, the overarching goal was to scale: to grow our team as we simultaneously grew our audience, reach and impact. As the fastest-growing sportswear brand on the planet, it would be easy to find ourselves chasing our audience’s needs. Instead, we chose to set the pace. Whereas much of the team's previous work had been led by the product launch calendar, we decided to go "story first" and take a proactive approach to telling great stories independent of the business calendar. We also decided to innovate as intensely and creatively as the R&D team. The goal in the past year was to experiment with new formats and topics in the same way that the engineers test products in the On Lab.
Challenges
The main challenge during the past 12 months has been bandwidth and scaling our content operations. To put On’s growth into context, In 2017, we sold 1 million pairs in one year. Today, we sell 1 million pairs every 43 days. This results in a rapidly growing global audience with an ever-increasing demand for content. This makes finding the right creative talent fast enough to deliver fresh thinking and quality content the primary challenge for the team. In 2021, keeping pace meant more than doubled the team from 7 members to 17. This created a truly global, flexible, multilingual team constantly pivoting and adapting to deliver on our content objectives as the pandemic continued to throw curveballs.
Results
During the past 12 months, we have accelerated the growth on our established digital channels, while at the same time innovating with new formats. The Stories section of on-running.com saw a 19% increase in year-on-year traffic, with almost 4.5 million views. This came from over 3.9 million visitors, and drove an overall average page value of CHF 1.65 (the spend of those who viewed the pages averaged by the number of views).
Year-on-year, our social media following increased significantly: our Instagram community grew by 44% to 724,000, delivering a reach of 755 million and over 1 billion impressions. On our goals to innovate with content formats and reach new audiences, we’ve also delivered. We have published, and are now selling, our first magazine “OFF”, with an initial print run of 12,000 copies. We also hosted the first live broadcasts on the On YouTube channel – where our number of subscribers grew by 42%.
And in the perhaps team’s biggest commercial contribution, we supported the company’s IPO process that raised over $746 million in investment. Like we said, it was quite a year.
