On Splits Commercial Role to Elevate CX as a Board-Level Priority

What happened

On, the Swiss performance footwear and apparel brand, is restructuring its commercial leadership by splitting a single chief commercial role into two distinct positions. The move follows the departure of the brand's previous commercial chief and signals a deliberate organisational shift in how On intends to manage its growth across international markets and its direct relationship with customers.

Rebecca Cai has been appointed to lead global markets, taking responsibility for On's international commercial expansion. Separately, Alice Delahunt is joining the business with a focused remit on the customer — a newly carved-out leadership function that elevates customer experience to a standalone strategic priority at the executive level.

Why it matters

The decision to separate commercial and customer responsibilities is not merely a structural tidying exercise — it reflects a broader recognition that scaling a brand globally and deepening customer relationships are genuinely distinct disciplines requiring different leadership instincts. As activewear becomes an increasingly crowded and commoditised category, brands that treat "customer" as a subset of "commercial" risk subordinating experience to revenue targets. On is, in effect, betting that a dedicated customer executive will protect the experiential qualities that built its reputation, even as aggressive international growth accelerates.

From a behavioural economics standpoint, this structure matters because it creates an internal advocate whose success metrics are anchored to customer outcomes rather than sales volume. That separation of incentives is a meaningful design choice — one that can shift internal culture towards longer-term loyalty thinking rather than short-term conversion optimisation.

The Renascence take

Most coverage will frame this as a routine leadership reshuffle. It is worth reading it as something more deliberate: a public signal about where On believes competitive advantage will be won in the next phase of its growth.

The instinct to split "global markets" from "the customer" is sound, but the real test is whether the customer chief has genuine authority — over product experience, service design, post-purchase journeys — or whether the role becomes a sophisticated marketing function dressed in CX language. Customer-obsessed operators should ask themselves the same question internally: does your most senior customer advocate have a seat at the table where trade-offs are actually made, or do they arrive after the commercial decisions are already taken? The org chart is the strategy. What On has drawn on paper now has to be lived in practice.