On Expands Cyclon Program With Resale, Donation, and Recycling Options

Four years after launching Cyclon as a subscription-only experiment, On scrapped the membership model entirely and rebuilt the program from the ground up as a brand-wide circularity ecosystem, announcing the shift from Zurich on March 17. The Swiss running brand now routes returned gear through a three-tier hierarchy: items in excellent condition go back out as resale, pieces that don't pass that bar get donated through partner organizations, and anything that can't be donated gets recycled. On handles the logistics itself, which is the part that actually makes this interesting.

Cyclon Resale is already live in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with expansion to additional markets planned. The subscription service that launched the program in 2022 is being discontinued — no replacement tier, no hybrid model, just a clean break. Starting in June 2026, the full line of Cyclon collection products, all designed for recyclability from the start, will be available for direct purchase at cyclon.on.com, which also handles trade-ins and pre-loved gear shopping.

The operational logic here is worth paying attention to. "On takes care of all the behind-the-scenes work to resell, donate or recycle returned goods, so our customers know we are taking responsibility for each product after its first life through a new circular services platform," Breme told Footwear News. That framing matters: the friction of figuring out what happens to your old gear lands on On, not on you. Whether that promise holds at scale depends on partners On hasn't named publicly yet — the press release references "experienced donation organizations and regional recyclers" without identifying them.

Recycled materials recovered from returned Cyclon products will feed back into new shoe parts or be directed into other industries entirely. On hasn't published volume targets or material recovery percentages, and the exact nature of the return incentives, whether store credit, shipping subsidies, or something else, hasn't been specified. The program's ambition is clearly to move well past the pilot stage: On described the 2022 subscription as a learning exercise that yielded "valuable, first-hand information about materials and ownership models," and positioned everything since as the scalable version that data made possible.

The more significant claim buried in the announcement is the scope shift. Cyclon is no longer a curated sub-line of recyclable products but, per the brand, a commitment to taking responsibility "for every product it sells." That's a different kind of promise than a trade-in program, and one that will take more than a launch day in three markets to prove out.