When on April 15 Kenyan Hellen Obiri crossed the finish line as the winner of the Boston Marathon people were looking not only at her great time of 2:22:37. They were staring at her shoes … or were they shoes at all? Where were the laces and the tongue?
Swiss shoe company On had given the running world a front-row tease of its big product news. Obiri was running in the Cloudboom Strike LS, a spray-on running shoe. Made by a robot.
You heard right. The shoe’s whole upper is sprayed on to an outer sole, thread by thread of polyester, while a robot arm holds the shoe. On calls its new technology Lightspray which has been keept under wraps until now. With the Olympics coming up, the company want to give the world a look into its factories.
The spraying takes three minutes from start to finish and cuts down carbon emissions by up to 75 percent, the company claims. It also provides for rapid prototyping and brings the manufacturing closer to the customer, rather than have it done at a specialized facility across the globe. On really believes this is an important piece of the company’s future. In the factory, a team of 50 On employees works. The company wants to push the spray on-technology and says that the crew will expand to a robot team of 100 people pretty soon.
The result of the robot work is a lighter and also cheaper shoe, On says. The fabric costs 2 cents to produce. Its thinness makes the shoe super light and gives the upper a sock-like feel. It is for sure the lightest shoe On has ever produced, weighing just 170 grams in the men’s version and 158 grams in the women’s. Having robots at work in the factory instead of big machines makes for big possibilities, the company says. On thinks in the future it could set up a robot in a flagship store and make shoes on-the-go for walk-in customers.
On is not first brand in the sector to develop sports shoes of this nature. Back in 2016 the tech people of Herzogenaurach made it possible to use robots to make wowen shoe uppers. Later Adidas also began producing 3D-printed outsoles and combining them with an upper. That project, called Futurecraft, was cancelled in 2019. We’ll see what On’s competitors come up with after the Cloudboom Strike LS’s premiere.
And on August 10, when she stands at the starting line in Paris 2024 for that classic Olympic discipline the marathon, Obiri will of course be wearing the latest Cloudboom Strike LS model.
