On has been available in Spain for years through wholesale partners and its own website. In November it took a room of its own on Madrid’s Calle Serrano, and built it as a running club rather than a shop. The launch is the product; the shoe is what the launch leaves behind.

The trade press read it as a flagship. WWD counted the square metres and the Golden Mile address. That measures the wrong thing. On did not pay Salamanca prices for footfall; it paid them for the runners who pass that window every New Year’s Eve.

Those runners belong to the San Silvestre Vallecana, the ten-kilometre race that has crossed central Madrid every 31 December since 1964. The fun run alone now draws over 42,000 entrants. On did not build it. A race is a congregation that assembles itself once a year; On has only built a door onto it, and left that door open every Wednesday.

The mechanism is a run club every Wednesday at seven, which On’s EMEA chief frames as a way to solidify the brand’s “premium positioning”. You come as you are, you run with strangers, the shoes wait by the door.

Loyalty is cheapest when the customer mistakes it for a hobby.

On has run this play before. It opened owned rooms from Zürich to Riyadh, and in Latin America found the highest brand awareness it has anywhere in the world. The shop arrived after the crowd, not before it.

On still earns most of its money the old way. In the third quarter, wholesale supplied 479.6 million Swiss francs of 794.4 million in net sales, roughly six francs in every ten. A company that lives on other people’s shelves chose not to enter its newest market through one. What it bought on Serrano is not a storefront — it is the crowd a storefront later sells to.