On Holding reported direct-to-consumer sales grew 28% year-over-year in its third quarter, according to TradingView, as the premium running shoe and apparel brand leans harder into owned channels while wholesale partners face margin pressure and promotional cycles. The Swiss company, known for its CloudTec cushioning technology and roster of professional athlete endorsers, is using DTC expansion to preserve brand positioning and avoid the markdown trap squeezing rivals dependent on multi-brand retail.
The company operates 230 owned retail stores globally and continues to invest in its ecommerce platform, per the source. DTC now represents a growing share of total revenue, insulating On from the promotional churn that has eroded margins for brands reliant on wholesale partners who bundle premium product into seasonal sales events. The channel shift allows On to control pricing, customer data, and the full brand narrative from first click to unboxing.
The mechanism is straightforward. Premium physical products face two threats in wholesale: retailers discount to move volume, and competitors flood the same shelf space with similar styling at lower price points. By routing more customers to owned stores and its own site, On captures the full retail margin, builds a direct relationship, and can test new colorways or limited releases without negotiating SKU slots with a buyer. The brand also collects zero-party data on fit preferences, purchase frequency, and lifetime value, which wholesale sellthrough reports cannot provide. When a customer buys a $170 Cloudmonster sneaker on on.com instead of at a department store, On keeps the retail markup and learns whether that buyer wants trail shoes next or a running jacket.
The wholesale channel still matters for discovery and geographic reach, but On is using DTC as the margin lever and the retention engine. Competitors who cannot or will not shift mix toward owned channels are stuck negotiating wholesale terms each season while On invests DTC profit back into product development and brand marketing that drives more customers to its own doors.
A small physical-product brand can run the same play on modest budget by treating owned channels as the profit center and wholesale or marketplace presence as the top-of-funnel awareness driver. Start by listing product on Amazon or in a regional specialty retailer to generate search volume and early proof, then capture repeat buyers on your own Shopify or WooCommerce site using a 10% discount code for first direct purchase. Email the wholesale buyer post-purchase with the code and a reason to switch: early access to new releases, free returns, or a loyalty point for every dollar spent. Route all paid social and influencer traffic to the owned site, not the marketplace listing. Test a pop-up or booth at a local market or trade show, collect emails, and convert those leads on your site within 72 hours using a limited-run product or colorway not available elsewhere. The unit economics improve immediately—you keep an extra 30-50% margin per sale—and you own the customer file for future launches. Run this loop for 90 days, measure repeat rate on owned versus wholesale channels, then shift ad spend and inventory toward the higher-return path. The goal is not to abandon wholesale but to make it the audition, not the main stage.
On Holding's playbook proves the pattern scales: use wholesale for reach, own the high-margin repeat relationship, and let channel mix protect pricing power when the market turns promotional.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.