Designing stores to engage local communities

Words by Robert Birnbaum. Photography by Joe Clark.

We’re on the spacious sixth floor of the On Labs building in Zurich. It’s not your average office space. Highlights include an area featuring the “Hanging Tree” – a naturally preserved Stone Pine from Switzerland’s Engadine region, suspended from the ceiling. There’s also a “hack garage” for spontaneous creative brainstorms and a Hall of Fame for On graphic design work. 

The sixth floor is where the vision, values and mission of the brand are transformed into visual and physical expressions. Among the forward-thinking design brains working on this floor is a group of architects and spatial designers. Between small piles of material samples and blueprints, they routinely put their heads together to lay out the next generation of On stores around the world. It would be easy to imagine them simply arranging shelves, embellishing them with graphics and texts, all for one purpose: to sell products. After all, that’s the traditional role of a store. But in an economy where, by 2026, almost a quarter of all retail sales are predicted to happen online, stores have to become more than theaters for transactions. 

Conversely, turning physical stores into pure showrooms or gallery-style spaces doesn’t seem to be the answer either. The challenge at hand is balancing the opportunity for visitors to try and buy On products, while also offering an experience that goes far beyond transactions. For Diana Dowling, Head of Retail Design at On, the goal is to develop physical spaces that are intuitive, inspiring and functional – not only to serve customers, but communities. 

Dowling explains how the team’s approach to bringing a store to life, and connecting to movement and our community, comprises several stages. 

Find the right location

“The first step is assessing where we want to be positioned in a city. Who are our neighbors? Who lives in this neighborhood? How does this store fit into their lives? Because it’s not only about where they usually go to shop. Sometimes, the specific community we want to cater to lives outside the city center. In which case you’d prefer being close to them rather than primarily focusing on shopping hotspots.” 

Take what the building gives you

Once the general location is set, it’s about finding the right space – in terms of total area, but also its characteristics. 

“Especially in Europe, you have cities with a rich history. You're dealing with unique architecture where you can’t change everything to the extent you might like to.” Dowling explains this by referring to the newest addition to the fleet – Germany’s first On Store, opening March 2024 in Berlin Mitte. 

“Our new Berlin location covers two floors, which can make things tricky. We have to ensure that we're meeting our visitors’ needs on both floors – not least in terms of safety and accessibility – and how we need to adapt that space accordingly. With the downstairs floor – we’re fortunate to have a generous skylight that saturates the space with natural daylight. It’s a wide room, designed with a circular approach like our Paris store. In this case, ‘circular’ means that visitors won’t run into any dead ends. They’ll find fitting rooms downstairs and can check out there and then. It’s our way of valuing our customers’ time.”

Create an intuitive journey

“The actual store design starts with the floor plan. Laying out the customer journey is the very backbone of it all. We’re looking at precise placement of every fixture, every storytelling element, every fitting room, exit corridor clearances. This way, we can make sure that parents with strollers or people in wheelchairs all have access.”

At this stage of the design process, navigation through the space becomes a main focus, too. 

“We want people to feel like they’re on an intuitive journey. What they feel in our store should be similar to what they feel on our website. When they come to the website, they are guided by terms such as  ‘run’, ‘train’, and  ‘travel’. We want to ensure they're going to get those same sort of navigation cues in the store.” 

That’s where so-called “sight lines” come in.

“We spend a lot of time thinking about how visitors read the layout of the store. When you walk into a store, your eyes have choice as to what they land on at any given point. And you’re already creating this journey for yourself, where your priorities land. So when we consider any piece of text in a store, we’re thinking about how far away we want a customer to read it from. If we’re working on a sign that should drive them downstairs, the letters need to be at a certain size so that they know right away ‘I can see the trail collection down there, this is where I could go next’.”

Localize the experience

Culture varies from country to country, city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. If a store aims to become part of a community, it needs to be designed with a strong local flavor, Dowling stresses.

“In Berlin, we see lots of urban runners who maybe get out to the countryside on the weekends, but live this nine-to-five city life during the week. If they're working Monday to Friday in the city, they'll be running in the local streets and parks to get their miles in. This inspired us to play to the history of our building in Berlin by leaving a lot of the existing brick surfaces exposed, but then brought in these big wood elements to create a juxtaposition to the architecture. So you have this park-in-a-city feel in a very conceptual way, not a literal way. It's more about evoking the feeling and the connection to these environments rather than being very literal with it.”

Inspire movement 

Purposefully placed throughout the store are graphics and screens telling stories of On’s origins and athletes. Seeing a product is one thing, but seeing what others – and the visitors themselves – can achieve in it, is another. This is where a coherent design concept enhances the shopping experience: from browsing for gear to browsing for inspiration, too.

“We pepper these elements throughout the experience. We pay close attention to the adjacency of that placement. So as a customer is going through the store, and they see a product, it's very obvious that the product is living in the same theme as the stories we're telling in the space around it.” 

In a world where it’s easy to feel overstimulated, Dowling’s team carefully balances the volume of storytelling elements during the visitors’ journeys. “It's easy to put in a screen and update the video all the time, but we also know that our customers come in for a considered experience. Having a screen flashing in their face at every corner is not what they need.”

Enrich a moving community

Since moving together is at the heart of the On mission, one big goal of the stores is to create connection among their visitors. Hence, select On stores host a weekly run club, and so will the Berlin location, soon after opening. This is where existing and aspiring members of Berlin’s running community can find a welcoming, energizing environment to move together. The store also features a community board to announce events and initiatives. But ask Dowling which part of the Berlin location influences the community most, and she’s quick to champion the people running the store.

Their impact reaches far beyond finding the right gear and size for visitors. They connect to the community, find out how they like to move and involve them in the next movement session – be it the weekly run club, or workouts with partners like Barry’s Bootcamp and Urban Sports Club.

With all of these considerations working hand in hand, Dowling’s passion for On retail spaces like the Berlin store is palpable. Inspiration, technology and empowering gear coming together in an intuitive space – “It's going to be a powerful place”.

If you want to see the On retail design philosophy in action, the new On Store Berlin Mitte opens its doors on March 15, 2024 at Neue-Schönhauser-Straße 19, 10178 Berlin.