Inside On’s tech lab, where robots build running shoes in 3 minutes and can eliminate up to 300 hours of human work

At first glance, the machine looks almost underwhelming. Inside a brightly lit laboratory at On’s Zurich headquarters, a robotic arm rotates a plastic model of a human foot. At the same time, a nozzle continuously sprays 1.5 km (0.93 miles) of thin molten plastic with almost hypnotic precision. Recommended Video Layer by layer, the filament wraps itself around the foot mold, gradually forming the upper of a running shoe. The entire process takes about three minutes. In the sportswear industry, shoes have long been assembled through labor-intensive processes involving cutting, stitching, gluing, and sewing together as many as 200 individual components.

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