DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJuly 25, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

On Running: The Hole That Became the Logo

Look at the sole of an On) running shoe and you will see a row of hollow chambers — open cavities carved straight through the midsole. Your instinct, if you have ever designed a product, is that this is a flaw waiting to happen: holes collect grit, complicate manufacturing, and expose the one part of a shoe designers usually smooth into a clean slab. On built a multi-billion-dollar company by deciding those holes were the entire point.

The company was founded in Zurich in 2010 by former professional triathlete Olivier Bernhard with David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti. The origin is almost comically literal: Bernhard glued sections of garden hose to the bottom of a running shoe, chasing a specific feeling — a soft landing followed by a firm push-off. Those hose segments became CloudTec: hollow pods that collapse on impact to cushion, then firm up as you roll forward to propel. The sensation it produced gave the brand its name and its tagline — running on clouds — and won an innovation award within a month of launch.

Here is what makes it a concept-phase masterclass rather than just a clever sole. That single decision — expose the cushioning as open chambers — is doing three completely different jobs at once, and doing all three better than a dedicated solution would.

First, it is the function. The cavities are the cushioning system; the geometry of how they collapse and rebound is the performance story, not a marketing layer bolted on top.

Second, it is the silhouette. The holes define the profile of the shoe from ten metres away. Where most sneakers fight to differentiate an essentially similar side view with logos and colourways, an On is recognisable by its cross-section alone.

Third — and this is the rare part — it is the brand mark. You identify an On not by a swoosh or a wordmark but by the holes themselves. The functional feature is the logo. In legal terms it became trade dress: the look of the product is the identity, protectable as such. Most companies spend enormous effort making a brand mark, a product feature and a silhouette all point in the same direction. On collapsed the three into one decision, made at the very start.

That fusion is why it has proven so hard to compete with. A rival can copy a colour or a name in a season; copying a feature that is simultaneously the function, the form and the trademark means copying the whole design language — and doing so looks like imitation precisely because the feature is so identifying. On also got the timing of conviction right: it held the CloudTec look steady while iterating relentlessly underneath, so the signature strengthened rather than drifted. By the time Roger Federer joined as an investor and partner in 2019 and the company reached its 2021 IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, the holes were worth more than any applied logo could have been; its own company history now reads as a study in single-decision leverage.

There is a discipline here that generalises far beyond footwear, and it is the opposite of the usual advice to "differentiate." The strongest concept-phase move is not to add a distinguishing mark to a finished product; it is to find the one decision that can carry function, form and identity simultaneously — and then to protect it as if it were all three, because it is. Those decisions are rare and they are made early, when the object is still an idea and you are choosing what its defining gesture will be. Get it right and marketing becomes almost free: the product sells its own recognisability every time someone glances at it.

That is the lesson we keep returning to at Depix. The concept phase is where you decide whether your identity will be something applied to the object later, or something the object simply is. On decided its brand would be a hole in the sole — a void, of all things — and made that void do the work of a feature, a silhouette and a logo at once. The most valuable thing they designed was not a cushion. It was a decision that refused to be only one thing.

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