Hi everyone, welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can’t find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture.
You’ll have noticed there was no Tuesday newsletter this week. That’s because I’ve been in South Korea reporting on today’s story, which includes insights from interviews with On co-founders Caspar Coppetti and Olivier Bernhard and chief innovation officer Scott Maguire, who had details to share on the brand’s latest technological development, an innovation which they believe will radically alter the future of athletic sneaker production for years to come. Enjoy.
For a few years now, executives and a close-knit team of engineers, designers and scientists at Swiss sneaker giant On have quietly been developing a patented innovation that they believe could one day revolutionise how the brand, and perhaps the entire sportswear industry, approaches sneaker manufacturing.
Yesterday, at a secretive factory building on the outskirts of Busan, South Korea’s second largest city, On revealed in no uncertain terms its belief that that day had arrived.
Entering the newly opened facility, its hard not to be struck by the contrast of the nondescript facade and the sleek, ultramodern and scientific scene that greeted me on the inside, where 32 fully automated robots worked in perfect harmony—while other robots shuttled prototypes to and from different workstations—creating unit after unit of the LS Cloudmonster 3 Hyper, the first performance running shoe that On will make at scale for the mass market using its robotic LightSpray tech.
