A Garden Hose Stapled to a Sole

Olivier Bernhard was a Swiss professional triathlete with a specific complaint: he wanted a shoe that landed soft and pushed off hard, and those two things fight each other. Cushioning absorbs impact on the way down and it also absorbs the energy you want back on the way up.

So he cut up a garden hose and stapled lengths of it to the bottom of a running shoe.

Sit with that image for a second, because it belongs next to the waffle iron from the Nike chapter and it is doing the same job.

The prototype required no laboratory, no materials science degree, no supplier relationship and no money. It required noticing a problem precisely, and being willing to look completely ridiculous while working on it. A man stapling hosepipe to a trainer is not a person anybody would fund. He was, however, the only person solving that problem.

The hollow pods became CloudTec: they collapse on landing and lock together for the push. On launched in 2010, Bernhard with David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti.

Then, in 2019, the thing that makes this chapter the last word on a thread running through the whole subject.

Roger Federer put in around fifty million dollars for a stake of roughly three per cent, plus design involvement.

He did not sign with On. He bought part of it.

Go back to the Nike chapter and lay the two deals side by side, because the line between them is clean and thirty-five years long.

In 1984 the convention was to pay an established champion a flat fee to wear a logo. Predictable, low-risk, and you are renting a face for as long as the payments continue. Nike broke it by giving an unproven rookie a share of the revenue and his own name on the product, which made the athlete an owner of the outcome rather than a tenant.

In 2019 On took the same logic one step further and sold a retiring champion actual equity.

Watch what that changes. A fee ends when the contract ends, and the day after it ends the athlete has no reason to care what happens to you. Equity does not end. Federer is exposed to how this company performs for decades, long after he stopped competing, which makes him a genuinely different kind of partner from somebody being paid to appear.

It is the Air Jordan structure with the last remaining piece of rental removed.

The other thing this brand demonstrates is what it takes to enter a settled category late. Running shoes in 2010 were not an opening. Nike, Adidas, Asics, New Balance, decades of relationships, budgets a new company cannot see the top of.

A nicer colourway would have been nothing. Taste alone would have been nothing. What worked was a real technical difference that was visible on a shelf and detectable on a run, both at once. Against companies that size, the product has to actually be different, and it has to be different in a way a customer can perceive without being told.

Which brings the whole subject back to where it started.

Bill Bowerman ruined his wife's waffle iron in the 1960s because no supplier would give him the grip he wanted. Olivier Bernhard stapled garden hose to a sole in the 2000s because no shoe would give him the landing he wanted.

Fifty years apart, two enormous companies, one method.

The giants were all built by people improvising with household objects, and nothing about how big they have become has closed that door behind them.