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Senior Lead - Brand Environment Design
Location: Zurich
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In short
As a Senior Design Lead, Brand Environment Design at On, you will be instrumental in shaping how our brand comes to life in the physical world outside of retail. You will lead the spatial design direction, translating On’s distinctive brand design language into consistent, immersive, and premium physical experiences globally. This role is about creating visionary concepts, guiding design teams and external partners, and developing the strategic frameworks that ensure every physical touchpoint feels unmistakably On: premium, coherent, and rooted in innovation.
Your Mission
Your Mission Your core mission will be to define and elevate how On shows up in the physical world, driving creativity and consistency across all non-retail touchpoints. You will be responsible for:
-Leading Spatial Design Direction: Directing the creative path for non-retail environments to guarantee visual harmony and premium execution that reflects our core identity.
-Creating Concepts and Narratives: Translating brand priorities and overarching creative direction into tangible, immersive, and impactful physical concepts and compelling experience narratives.
-Guiding Designers and Agencies: Developing inspiring briefs that empower internal and external talent to transform high-level strategy into premium, aesthetically aligned outputs from concept to launch.
-Ensuring Creative Alignment and Fidelity: Acting as the guardian of On's design standards, ensuring all physical brand expressions maintain premiumness and coherence across diverse touchpoints. This includes publishing the first official "Brand Environment Design Guidelines/Principles" aligned with new premium retail standards.
-Developing Toolkits & Design Frameworks: Designing comprehensive physical brand systems and scalable toolkits that facilitate locally relevant yet globally unified brand expression across activations and strategic spaces.
-Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration: Serving as a key connector across brand, retail, and regional experience teams, aligning physical executions to a unified omnichannel vision.
-Championing Innovation & Premiumness: Continuously evolving On's physical brand presence by infusing each activation with innovative thinking, high-end design standards, and an elevated aesthetic that redefines what premium means for a performance brand. This includes supporting immersive "LightSpray" technology showcases and ensuring athlete-centric environments reflect On's premium, performance-first identity.
Image gallery
Your story
We are looking for a visionary design leader who bridges creative artistry with strategic frameworks and holds a deep-seated drive for crafting immersive brand worlds. To be successful in this role, you should bring:
-Proven Experience: A minimum of 5–7 years of experience in spatial design, environmental design, or experiential architecture, with a strong track record of leading design teams.
-The Right Profile: Experience working within a top-tier creative advertising/experiential agency, ideally coupled with in-house experience at a premium, global lifestyle or performance brand. You understand both the fast-paced creative rigor of agency life and the strategic long-term vision of an in-house brand.
-Proven Project Scale: Proven experience managing large-scale, complex physical design projects and activations from concept to execution, comfortably handling project budgets ranging from $250k to $1M+.
-Portfolio of Immersive Environments: A portfolio showcasing high-impact physical spaces outside of standard retail, such as global brand activations, large-scale event summits, pop-ups, and premium athlete-centric environments.
-Strategic Toolkit Development: Extensive experience in developing global toolkits, design principles, and scalable frameworks that enable consistent and high-quality brand expression across various global markets.
-Creative Visionary & Advocate: The ability to materialize complex creative themes into premium, high-impact physical environments, maintaining an unwavering focus on quality, detail, and brand integrity.
-Collaborative Leadership: A demonstrated ability to steer internal design teams and external production agencies, aligning diverse cross-functional stakeholders and regional teams around a unified vision.
-Effective Communication: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills in English are required; additional languages are a plus for global collaboration.
About the Team
We ensure that wherever the brand meets people in the real world—be it on a global stage, within an athlete environment, at a summit, or in a B2B setting—it feels unmistakably On: premium, coherent, and rooted in innovation. Translating brand intent into physical reality through guidelines, toolkits, and execution frameworks.
About the Team video
Ann
Senior Director of Brand Studio
What we offer
On is a place that is centered around growth and progress. We offer an environment designed to give people the tools to develop holistically – to stay active, to learn, explore and innovate. Our distinctive approach combines a supportive, team-oriented atmosphere, with access to personal self-care for both physical and mental well-being, so each person is led by purpose.
On is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to creating a work environment that is fair and inclusive, where all decisions related to recruitment, advancement, and retention are free of discrimination.
What to expect
We want to set everyone up for success, so here’s the lowdown on how we hire. Our process is a two-way street – bringing you into our culture, while helping us learn how you think.
Our full process can last about eight weeks from application to offer, because we care about getting it right. These steps explain how we usually do things.
Before you get started, feel free to consider if you want to work with us. Strange question? Well, we give people a lot of space to navigate their day-to-day and that style isn't for everyone. We want you to be passionate about what you do and be sure this is the right fit. Because when skills and passion combine – it creates that 'Wow' moment.