Investor day: On Holding targets $7 billion in sales by 2029, adds buyback

On Holding entered its 2026 Investor Day under a multifaceted pressure, part investor doubt, part expectation. On one side sat a stock that had lost the market’s confidence. Shares had fallen 22 percent on Aug. 11 after the company lowered its full year outlook, and by the eve of the event, the stock was trading around $27, close to its 52 week low of $26.36.

On the other side sat a very different kind of pressure, built by On itself. On Sept. 18, the company announced it was entering football, naming former Arsenal and France forward Thierry Henry as Director of Football and making World Cup winner Kylian Mbappé a global ambassador, alongside FC Barcelona’s Sydney Schertenleib.

Then, a weekend when sports media, influencer channels and the football world itself had their say, comments coming from well outside On’s usual running audience. 

By Tuesday, the company had its Investor Day to run in Zurich with a battered stock, a newly global spotlight on what it does next and all eyes on it, from investors and competitors as well.

It delivered a rally. On shares closed up 7.58 percent at $29.39, outperforming both the broader consumer discretionary sector and major sportswear peers. Still, not enough for On to fully recover what it lost over the year, and whether Tuesday’s move was real conviction or a one-day pop is something only the next few trading days will tell.

This is our account of the day, told in eight parts:

1. Theater (a day built like an Apple keynote)
2. Talk show
3. Ambition
4. Technology
5. Talent
6. Numbers
7. Questions
8. Reaction

Theater (a day built like an Apple keynote)

On staged the day as storytelling, not a commented slide deck. The slides were there because they had to be, but the room was watching the people delivering them, their pauses, their conviction, as much as anything on the screen behind them.

Co-founders David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti opened with the company’s own first running shoe prototype, the same object that has anchored On’s own telling of itself since 2010, using it as the through line for what came next: a “Premium Playbook” built on four reinforcing moves, creating innovative products, validating them through athletes and talent, delivering premium experiences and capturing high quality earnings. It is the same playbook, the founders said, that took gross margin from an “above 60 percent” promise made at the last Investor Day in 2023 to “above 65 percent” today.

Every chapter that followed, product, marketing, retail, finance, returned to that same framework.

“In performance, we will lead with running. In lifestyle, we will lead with sneaker. And in apparel, we will lead with her,”

Coppetti told investors, using “her” to mean the female consumer On is building its apparel line around, in contrast to the unisex approach of its running shoes. It was the first sharp line of a long day drawing the boundary between the three businesses On is building its 2029 plan on and the two sports it is entering on a longer runway.

Talk show

Then came the moment everyone had been waiting for, and the register flipped from keynote to talk show. Roger Federer, the tennis great and longtime On investor, walked out with Thierry Henry, the former Arsenal and France forward now running On’s football business, and the room leaned in. It was Gérald Marolf, On’s Chief Product Officer, who made the boldest claim of the day. He described testing a prototype boot on Kylian Mbappé just the week before, and promised the room:

“I can guarantee you, this is going to be the best football shoe that was ever made. That’s a promise.”

Henry didn’t blink: “Yeah, it’s okay, we’ll take it.”

Federer’s answer to why On, and not anyone else, went deeper than loyalty. He wanted a boot built for women, not a men’s boot resized, an idea he said came up again and again in his own conversations with Henry. 

“Women footballers… to wear men boots which I don’t think is normal,” he said.

Then, almost as an aside, he confirmed his own next chapter, appearing on stage in On’s new golf shoe and calling tennis the blueprint for how the brand should approach the sport, though football, he added, is “a very different” animal. Henry needed fewer words for his verdict. The shoe “does feel comfortable,” he said, echoing a line other executives had repeated throughout the day: athletes want to be seen and heard by the brands that sign them.

Ambition

Just theater? Marolf’s boast on stage sat on a discipline On applies to every category it enters, spelled out by co-founder David Allemann earlier in the day:

Can the innovation disrupt the category, does it build cultural relevance beyond performance, and is the category ready to be premiumized?

Football, Allemann said, passed on all three, the same test On later applied, retroactively, to explain why tennis worked and why golf will. 

Frank Sluis, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, used almost the same language in the closing Q&A, telling analysts On enters a category “if we can disrupt it with innovation, if we can be authentic and if we can premiumize.” That repetition told investors the ambition behind Marolf’s promise is written into how On makes decisions. 

The rollout itself is unhurried. A true market entry is planned for 2027, but only with limited drops, cleats and full performance apparel are not expected until 2028, a full year after the launch that made headlines on Sept. 18.

Technology

The whole “football weekend” ahead of the Investor Day was about people, the big names, especially Mbappé, that make for easy buzz. On used the day itself to remind everybody it is also a technology company, one that does not only make the shoes, but the machines that make the shoes, and holds the patents that protect the process.

LightSpray, the spray-on midsole technology behind the Cloud Boom Strike 2, carries more than 250 patents of its own, part of a wider company-wide portfolio of 650-plus, nearly half tied to CloudTec. Behind that patent wall sit 102 separate innovations, according to the company, and a growing production footprint: factories already running in Zurich and Korea, with more under construction

The results, On said, are already on the podium. Five elite athletes hit personal bests wearing LightSpray this year, and five of the ten fastest men at the 2026 Ironman 70.3 World Championship wore it too.

Product cadence backs up the ambition. Cloudsurfer 3, built on a new superfoam the company calls “Surreal,” 15 percent lighter, 20 percent softer and 15 percent more explosive than its predecessor, launches commercially on Oct. 1. 

Talent

Investors don’t buy a strategy alone, they buy the people set to run it. On used part of the day to make that case with scale first: 4,880 employees, more than 110 languages spoken across the company, 33 locations worldwide.

The culture numbers backed up the pitch. Eighty seven percent of leaders said they feel encouraged to be continuously innovative, and 86 percent said they have enough autonomy to try new approaches, an internal survey the company presented as proof its bureaucracy hasn’t caught up with its size.

Then came the bench. Scott Maguire, President and Chief Operating Officer, who joined in March 2025, has taken over the day to day running of the company alongside founders David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti. Frank Sluis runs the numbers as Chief Financial Officer, and Alex Griffin, the new Chief Marketing Officer, is behind the brand’s shift toward entertainment and storytelling.

The day saved its two most consumer-facing promotions for last. Rebecca Cai, who started at Nike before running On’s APAC business, becomes Chief Global Markets Officer, taking charge of markets across APAC, EMEA and the Americas plus global commercial teams, while Alice Delahunt, arriving from senior roles at Ralph Lauren and Burberry, becomes On’s first ever Chief Customer Officer, running digital, retail and customer loyalty. Both moves land in September 2026 and both point the same direction: On wants its commercial organization built closer to the customer.

Cai and Delahunt will not generate the headlines or social media buzz of Henry or Mbappé, but both are strategic hires, made under the same closeness to the customer message On carried through the whole day.

Numbers

By the time Frank Sluis, On’s Chief Financial Officer, took the stage, the room had been sitting for hours and dinner was closer than the next slide. He delivered anyway, walking through a level of financial detail well beyond what most companies volunteer at an investor day: a full margin bridge, region by region growth guidance, and a plan to shift financial reporting from Swiss francs to US dollars as early as 2027.

The core equation, in Sluis’s own words, is simple. “It is ‘and,’ not ‘or,’” he said, “premium drives demand, and demand drives growth.” Behind that line sat the capital allocation order he laid out for investors: organic growth first, chiefly retail expansion at a payback of under two years, then a maintained net cash balance sheet, and only then the $1 billion buyback of Class A shares running through 2029.

The regional breakdown was new to this Investor Day, giving analysts a map of where that growth is expected to come from.

Margin expansion, Sluis stressed, is not coming mainly from gross margin, it is coming from squeezing costs everywhere else the company can reach. Distribution costs have already come down sharply since 2023, and automating the Atlanta distribution hub should shave off more. The balance sheet tells a similar story: net cash has more than doubled, and On expects to cross the $5 billion sales mark sometime next year.

Questions

By the time the floor opened to analysts, the day had run long, and only a handful of questions made it through. Dinner was waiting.

How does the roughly $7 billion 2029 target break down? Running, sneaker and apparel are “broadly… about the same in terms of size” as contributors, together supplying more than three-quarters of the growth, apparel alone expected to triple over the next three years.

Why build apparel around “her”? Because the luxury industry has lost roughly 80 million customers to lower price points in recent years, a “blue ocean” management said sits between mass and luxury.

By the time the closing remarks came, the room had more than earned its drinks and dinner. But if anyone in Zurich felt shortchanged by a long day, one of the founders offered some comfort: nobody has to sit through another one for a while. “We’ll take like a three-year break until the next investor day,” he said, closing the official part of the event.

Reaction

By the closing bell, the numbers matched the mood in the room. On shares finished the day at $29.39, up 7.58 percent, the stock’s best single session in more than 10 months. The rally does not erase the year. On remains down more than a third since January, even after Tuesday’s gain, and the stock closed the day before the event at $27.32, barely above its 52-week low of $26.36.

One session doesn’t rewrite the year, but it’s the clearest sign yet that the market is ready to believe the story On is telling.