All revolutions have to start small — with an idea, and someone to make a case for it over and over again. At the Swiss footwear company On, that someone was Nils Altrogge, their Head of Tech Innovation, who has helped to bring a Wood Pencil, Yellow Pencil and an Impact Pencil to the award shelves of his company. “It’s a huge honour,” he tells D&AD, “especially to win it from the internal side. Usually it’s the agencies winning these awards.”

It was Altrogge who pushed On toward their award-winning product: the On Cloudneo, a 100% recyclable running shoe, paid for with monthly subscriptions and replaced by the company every six months. It’s a ‘running shoe you’ll never own’, as their copy puts it. On’s retrieval service, Cyclon, is the prime catalyst of what Altrogge terms as “the movement from a linear economy to a circular one” — a vision he hopes can be a gamechanger for achieving true sustainability, with On at the forefront. “We were founded in Switzerland, surrounded by the Swiss Alps,” he says. “Nature is a part of our everyday life, so we have a responsibility, and a mission, to preserve the planet.”

Altrogge is positively evangelistic about the impact that this work could have. “This is the greatest project I’ve ever worked on,” he says, beaming. It began when Altrogge, and another colleague of his, were talking about how many products go into one running shoe. “Usually it takes 25 different materials, and all of that we extract from the earth and then just throw away.” What if, Altrogge thought, you could bring that figure of 25 all the way down to one? Company management wasn’t instantly impressed. “At the very beginning, we had a tough time convincing others that it was possible,” he says.

And so, Altrogge and his colleague put together a proof of concept — one which was, in his words, “not even close to where we’d end up”, but one that was enough to start swaying doubters. Eventually, after putting more pressure on management, Altrogge was granted the ability to set up a task force for this project, to start sketching the contours of what this shoe could be, and what it would need to be successful. “Our wider goal is to reduce the impact we have on the planet,” he says, “circularity is just a tool. But if we can reduce our footprint and our waste, we would be — as the saying goes — killing two birds with one stone.”

The taskforce discovered fairly early that the scale of the challenge was twofold: they had to produce not only a shoe, but an entire logistical network set up to support the shoe’s production and reproduction — a task that brought in, by Altrogge’s count, “designers, product developers, engineers, material scientists, marketing, sales, business development, PR, everybody. It was like a start-up within a start-up.” Before anything else, though, they needed their miracle material: something sturdy and durable, yet mouldable, adaptable and, above all else, recyclable.

“Inside one of our other shoes was this stiff plate that sits in the midsole,” he says. “It was made from something called PEBAX, a polyamide with all the right properties.” First, they tried pulling it into threads, then spinning it into yarn, then spinning that yarn into laces. Next, they asked if it could be made into a foam? “Nobody had ever done this before with this material, so we had to experiment.” The foam worked, and Altrogge and his team kept moving piece by piece through the shoe until they had something that worked for each component. “I’ve never seen so many innovations go into a single product.”

After testing and testing, a few more management pushbacks and a global pandemic to contend with, Altrogge recalls, the On Cloudneo was ready. But questions persisted around how customers would respond to the service they hoped to offer. “How can we motivate people to send back shoes? How do we get them back?” Altrogge remembers asking. “This is an experiment for a new way of living, with this circular mindset.” But to his great relief, and to his company’s, their sustainable approach to shoe production has convinced not only existing customers but a host of new ones who had never bought a pair of their shoes before.

“I can’t give you the figures,” he says, “but a very high proportion of the subscribers for the Cloudneo are following the playbook, and mailing the product back every six months so we can keep things moving within our system.” Cyclon, the circular service to retrieve and replace their shoes, is ticking along well; waste has been minimised, systems have been put in place, and now praise is rolling in. The team behind it are delighted, Altrogge tells us. “We went through so many highs and lows together — we cried and we celebrated. It formed a bond between us.”

All of this success has now placed Altrogge’s mission front and centre of On’s business plans going forward. Already, they are taking a position within the footwear industry as vocal advocates for circularity. “We’ve been invited to podium discussions,” he says, “we’re helping other companies trying to shift from linear to circular.” There are even plans, by the end of the decade, for all of On’s shoes to be designed for circularity — if not made from one material, then two or three that can be easily separated and recycled. But this alone won’t change the world. “We have to be clear: just us being fully circular will not help — we all have to scale this up.”

Altrogge wants others to make the business case to their companies, and to the companies they work with, on how to innovate as they have and adapt their practices toward true sustainability. “We really do believe in a future where circularity is everywhere,” he tells D&AD. “Whether that’s ten or 20 years from now, who knows?” But if you have similar ambitions to lead your company into the future as he did, Altrogge has three bits of advice: “Dare to dream, dare to fail, and dare to finish the job. That’s what it takes, if you want to be a real innovator where you are.”