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I love seeing a brand become part of everyday life. I was in the big Uniqlo in Barcelona the other day and honestly got a bit blown away, standing there thinking about how a Japanese company ended up being where so many of us buy our staple t-shirts.

Trainers have gone the same way, just faster. Growing up it was Nike or Adidas, and Asics if you were the kid who actually enjoyed cross-country. Now go and look at any marathon start line or school gate. You’ll see Hokas with soles like small mattresses, New Balances on every dad who’s suddenly found himself fashionable, Salomons on hipsters who’ve never been near a trail, and a fair bit of Brooks and Saucony in between. Somewhere in all that, On has quietly taken more of Nike’s running share than anyone, while Adidas swanned off with the culture crowd and picked up Lamine Yamal on the way out.

Then last month On signed Mbappé, who’d been a Nike athlete since he was a kid, and they don’t even make a football boot yet.

So what on earth is going on at Nike? This week’s main story is how On pulled it off, and the best part is that it started with Nike saying no to a shoe made out of garden hose.

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Kylian Mbappé’s contract with Nike ran out on 31 July. Nike had sponsored him since 2006, when he was a boy in Bondy. He wore Mercurials through Monaco, PSG, Real Madrid and a World Cup win at 19, then finished this summer’s tournament as its all-time top scorer. Seven weeks later he signed with On, a Swiss running brand that has never sold a football boot and won’t have one until 2027.

On got here by doing the things a sportswear brand is supposed to grow out of. While Nike and Adidas were buying stadiums, it was winning over running shops one owner at a time. It now sends retailers fewer shoes than they order, a habit that helped knock about a fifth off its share price in a single day in August. The stock is down roughly 40 percent on the year, which makes it a strange place for the biggest name in football to land.

It looks less strange once you see who landed there first. Roger Federer left Nike in 2018 and signed a different kind of deal with On the following year. By 2025, Forbes had declared him a billionaire.

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The first thing I look at in the morning is a number. Sleep: 71. Readiness: 64. Before I’ve decided whether I’m tired, my phone has already decided for me, and a small line of text underneath suggests I take it easy today. When the battery runs low I don’t walk to the charger, I run. On the nights I sleep without the ring, I wake up feeling as though the night didn’t quite count, because nobody was keeping score.

What I keep turning over is that most mornings the ring isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already suspect. I knew I’d slept badly; I was there. Researchers at Leiden University found something similar when they followed around 800 young adults wearing Garmin watches for three months. On sleep, the devices mostly agreed with how people said they felt. On stress, the overlap was close to zero, and the study’s lead author had his own watch flag him as stressed while he was catching up with an old friend at a wedding.

That leaves the question of what I’m getting from a 64 that I didn’t already get from opening my eyes.

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Until the early 20th century, Buenos Aires required its delivery carts to be painted grey. Three Italian immigrants at a cart workshop started adding fine red lines along the bevels, customers liked them, and soon every competitor was copying. Those lines grew into fileteado porteño, a style of heavy ornament and gothic lettering. The city banned it from buses in 1975, and forty years later UNESCO listed it as intangible cultural heritage.

Most brand identities now start somewhere much quieter, on a bright screen with a Google Fonts shortlist, and end up in the same pale-oak room you find in Shoreditch, Tokyo and Brooklyn. The type that defines the big cities was made in rougher conditions. London’s road signs had to be read by drivers doing 70 mph, which is why Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert dropped the capitals-only alphabet the country had been using.

Madrid went the other way and chose a craft that had already stopped being practical. From 1991, the city had a ceramicist make plaques for 385 streets in its historic centre, nine painted tiles each. The lettering on them went on to have a far longer life than the commission ever asked of it.

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For the first few seconds it looks like a Zara ad. Models move through the frame to Notorious B.I.G., the styling is exactly right, and then you notice one of them is carrying a Chipotle takeout bag three feet wide, with a capacity of 170 litres.

Gut Miami shot the brand’s brown paper bag the way a fashion house shoots its it-bag, and Chipotle is calling it a “big ass bag for a big ass family meal.” Fernando Machado, Chipotle’s chief brand officer, describes the whole idea as ridiculous, and he means it as the selling point.

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