An exclusive tour of On Labs Paris

Swiss sportswear brand On is in Paris, with its Dream Together program delivering a range of community activations including community runs, talks and film screenings. They're also inviting the public to check out On Labs Paris, where they're demonstrating their revolutionary new spray-on polymer technology, LightSpray.

In simple terms, LightSpray uses a robot arm to create a single-piece upper that weighs only 30 grams and conforms to the wearer's foot and ankle without the need for laces. The process minimises waste, with On predicting a 75% reduction in carbon emissions over the shoe's lifecycle in comparison with traditional manufacturing, and can be completed in only three minutes.

On announced LightSpray hot on the heels of a new range of performance shoes for track and road, the Prism Collection. As well as introducing a hot new colourway for a number of existing silhouettes, Prism saw the wider release of three brand-new shoes: an advanced plated race-day shoe, the Cloudboom Strike, and two spikes: the Cloudspike Citius, intended for middle-distance track events, and the Cloudspike Amplius, for longer-distance track events. The Cloudboom Strike was the first shoe to receive the LightSpray treatment, to create the Cloudboom Strike LS. It’s the shoe that Hellen Obiri wore a prototype of when she won the Boston Marathon in April.

Tempo was lucky enough to have a preview of On Labs Paris and speak to two people in the innovation team: On's senior director of innovation, Ilmarin Heitz, and the brand's director of technology innovation and research, Nils Arne Altrogge.

This interview has been edited for clarity. We've combined Ilmarin's and Nil's answers to our questions.

Before we look at LightSpray, can we talk about the Cloudboom Strike? What was the design brief that led to this shoe?

The brief was to make the best high-performance running shoe, ramping up to Paris, for our athletes to compete, to have the biggest impact and to get to the podium. That was the goal.

What are the Cloudboom Strike's most important performance features?

I think you can split it into two pieces as we now have LightSpray. There's an upper piece and there's a bottom piece. So the majority of the performance input comes from the bottom, but the upper has an important role as well. So far we’ve mostly looked at the bottom unit and how we engineer our cushioning technology combined with our Speedboard, which is our propulsion plate. But with LightSpray we've added this ingredient that makes the upper high performing as well. So now we have these two pieces coming together to give us the best of both worlds. To make an even faster product.

The specific performance characteristics on the bottom unit are energy return in the foam and, with the plate, the stiffness of the shoe, and then, with LightSpray, the reduced weight of the full system, the fit, and how you are connected to the midsole, which gives you this propulsion in the right direction.

How does the Cloudboom Strike differ from other long-distance race-day shoes On already had in the market, such as the Cloudboom Echo 3?

When you get a new brief, you start to rework every single piece of the shoe. It starts with the outsole, goes to the midsole, goes to the Speedboard. It goes to the foam, goes to how we work with the interface of the foot, which is the sockliner, and then, of course, the upper, the lace.

We look at every single material piece in the shoe to re-engineer and take out weight and keep the same performance. We do that over and over again – together with our athletes – to streamline and optimise performance. Since the Echo 3, we’ve done this exercise again from scratch.

We changed the silhouette, we changed the material composition, we changed how our core technology, CloudTec, plays together with the foam, with our Speedboard; we changed how the upper fits and wraps the foot. These are the different levers we can push to tweak and to develop and further innovate on performance.

What are On’s hopes for the Cloudboom Strike as a competitor to shoes like Nike’s Vaporfly or Adidas’ Adios Pro Evo?

We're not looking at other competitors – we focus on ourselves. We want to make the best shoe for the athlete to perform. And the results of the last months have shown that we have extremely strong products to make our athletes win.

We’d barely seen the launch of the traditional, laced Cloudboom Strike before we got the Cloudboom Strike LS. How did the idea for LightSpray come about?

First of all, maybe it's important to know that we didn't try to improve the shoe we have right now with LightSpray. LightSpray was an idea that was born a few years ago. All of a sudden, we saw that it was going to be very interesting. It's so much more high performance because it uses so much less material – it's basically a one-piece upper.

As a philosophy at On, we always try to lose complexity but keep the same performance. With LightSpray, we realised there is an opportunity we can't ignore, and it's going to be better than everything else.

But of course we didn't expect that in the beginning, when [one of our colleagues] came with his [glue] gun. How everything came to life is it was inspired by a Halloween gun used to create spider webs. And then, by exploring at the beginning, we realised what comes out: a very lightweight upper fitting like a second skin. And this is a perfect match to high performance – it's super lightweight and a perfect fit, so you are in direct connection with the foam underneath. Basically, the shoe turns into an extension of your own system.

So, was reducing weight the main design problem you were responding to?

It was not. It was not the main design problem and it was not the only problem. There were, of course, many. Reducing the weight is an important parameter because, if you look at energy consumption, this of course helps to reduce that. That's always part of our goal, but with LightSpray there was much more than that. It's the fit, and it's how we are able now to define or design areas in the shoe very specifically to be more solid or more open for air ventilation.

And it's much more than that still because, for instance, the LightSpray construction allows us to get rid of the sockliner. So all of a sudden you have one less piece; you're closer to the bottom. You're much more locked into the shoe. So much more is involved than just losing weight, all of which makes the athlete perform better in a LightSpray product.

It’s such a radical rethinking of how uppers are made. What work and innovation went into its development?

It's a 360-degree innovation, right? We change how the product looks, feels and functions. We change how it's designed. So, instead of classic shoemaking, you suddenly use computational design and programming to make a shoe. Then you change how it's manufactured through the LightSpray machine. And then you have the final product. Basically, all the parts are innovation and all the parts are flowing into the development.

It's pretty much like we built a completely new system. So a company within the company, which does things completely differently. So every single step is now different – everything, not just the product.

Were there any particular technical challenges the team needed to solve?

Tons. In the innovation process, you need to fail. It's part of the process. There need to be challenges, there need to be problems. Otherwise you're not trying hard enough. And LightSpray had tons of problems, until it got where it is today. You don't see that, of course, but yes, there were many, many moments when we could have stopped. But our mindset is not giving up – we just do it different. For instance, the helix you can see when the material comes out of the robot, this helix was born because of a problem we saw in the beginning. And of course there are many more stories like this. When you have a dead end you always find another way, and that might be a better solution than where you were at the beginning.

How does the LightSpray tech ensure a good fit and lockdown compared with traditional laces?

Two things. First of all, through the specific design process, we could iterate a lot. So we can really find the perfect shape of the so-called last – the last is the part where the LightSpray is sprayed on – to make a fit which fits to the athlete. That's number one. The second thing is the material and the structure of LightSpray itself. It's elastic – nevertheless, it gives enough stability. So the combination of finding the right shape, combining it with the right material, and the right engineered pattern of the LightSpray helix creates this unique fit. So we create fit in a completely new way, and because we can iterate so quickly we can also test so many products.

We don't need laces because the system is elastic enough. It's very similar to a sock, right? You can put your foot in and it adapts to a certain way to your different kind of fit but delivers the same performance. So that's the beauty of it. It fits a lot of people, and no lace is needed. The material has a great stretch characteristic. And it can stretch a lot when you put your foot in. And it perfectly shapes around your foot .

Some people have wondered whether this is intended as a single-use shoe. Can you comment on this and whatever it's been tested for fit and lockdown over a duration?

Yes, this is very important. We are not making a single-use shoe. Sustainability is extremely close to our heart. So for us, durability is very important. The most important thing about sustainability is that the product needs to last as long as possible. And that's part of our innovation job to make to assure that. If we don't do that, then we haven't done our job right.

From the beginning the goal was never to make a shoe which lasts for one race; the goal was to make a shoe you can keep as long as you want. Of course, it has its end at some point, but our ambition is to make it more sustainable and long-lasting.

We’ve been told that one of the advantages of LightSpray is that it can be manufactured closer to the customer. Tempo Journal is based in Australia – could you give an example of what this might look like in the Australian/Pacific/Asian market?

Sure. The industry is currently quite centralised, right? And that's kind of the norm. LightSpray now gives us the opportunity to decentralise again if we want and produce closer to our customers and our athletes, wherever we want and whenever we want. Of course, that's also true for Australia; if we wanted then we could just very easily set that up. Currently that's not our plan. We don't have plans that tomorrow we are going global. Currently, we are focused on what we have here. Right now, it's in Paris. And tomorrow it will be somewhere else. And from these learnings we can then start to scale up, slowly and closer to the customer. That's our vision.

It also involves much less waste, minimising carbon emissions by 75%. Could you explain more?

How we assess this may be the first important thing to understand. We're doing a life-cycle assessment. It looks from the raw material of the polymer, through the production process, all the shipping and logistics, until the end of life of the product. Together with a third party, we analysed that. Basically, we measured how it is for a normal upper and how it is for LightSpray.

The reduction mainly comes from the energy we use. We no longer have 200 different steps involved to make an upper. It's only one, in one location – not several locations for different materials. So we're using much, much less energy. The second thing is reduced waste. We don't have any cutoffs or leftovers coming out of the process. We only use the material which is sprayed on the shoe, so the waste is minimised.

Another important thing is that because LightSpray can be engineered so well, we use less material than in a normal upper but with similar, better function. It's so precise. And this is also why it's more sustainable. It's performs better by using less material. Cleverer engineering is a reason for better sustainability.

And it’s made from a recyclable material. Could you talk about On’s goals to be a circular footwear manufacturer? With LightSpray specifically, but also in general.

So, a few years ago we launched a product called Cloudneo. And this was the first fully recyclable product, which can only be rented. So basically you need to subscribe to it and then you get access to it, and once it's done we get it back. So that was the first fully circular shoe. It pioneered our belief as a company that we should become circular in the future.

And this is one of our goals not just in our vision but also in the innovation team: that we become circular at some point. So everything we do is rooted in this project. We go step by step, in every product, to use more materials that can be recycled again. And at some point we will be able to recycle our whole collection to become a fully circular company.

Of course, LightSpray is perfectly designed so it can be recycled. While this is not our primary goal, it works very well with this concept. We feel that in the future, it's a no brainer that we can take all these shoes back and use them again.

Apart from the Cloudboom Strike, which other On shoes could we soon see LS versions of?

At the moment we have the Cloudboom Strike LightSpray. The next shoes we have are for track and field. It's our new Prism Collection spikes with the LightSpray: Citius and Amplius. At the moment, it's important to focus on high performance. Nevertheless, there is potential for other products, but here you need to give it a moment in time – stay curious and we'll keep you updated.

Everything is possible. The sky's the limit.

LightSpray is such a new technology – is it still evolving? What might we see in the future?

This is just the start of a journey. Just now you saw one robot. But imagine if there were many robots working together – imagine what we could do with that. And I'll leave it there.

The Cloudboom Strike was unveiled as part of the new Prism Collection. What were some of the design drivers for this new collection?

One thing that's beautiful about LightSpray is there's almost no colour. So, as you saw, the raw material that comes out is kind of pure. It's non-dyed. And that's important for us because, first of all, it's super sustainable and, secondly, it talks to what the material looks like. It tells you the story; it does not lie. And then, how we apply the colour, it's extremely smart – it's this inkjet technology where we only use a tiny bit of colour pigment. This is then cured, with the system you saw, and sticks very well to the material.

The beauty of it is the silhouette does not need a lot of colour because it's already interesting. And when it comes to how we want to colour it in the future, the possibilities are endless because you can colour the material by adding a very small amount of pigment to the polymer and the whole shoe would have a colour. And then you can use the inkjet technology to add colour on top. So we are extremely free to design whatever we want in terms of silhouette and look. And there again, it's interesting because it leaves us many options open, not just for the high performance sector, but also, of course, for an everyday product. So we are extremely happy.

As part of the new Prism Collection, we’re also coming up to the launch of the Cloudsurfer Next in early August. Can you tell us anything about that just yet?

Absolutely. The first Cloudsurfer was also a pioneer. That first evolution of the Cloudsurfer used a new technology called CloudTec Phase. This new generation builds on the success of that, and we are going to put all the learnings we had from the first version into the second version.

The Cloudsurfer is known for its amazing roll and the cushioning we are famous for as a brand. You'll see that this new product is stepping into the future and taking all the learnings from the past to make it even a better shoe for a broader audience.