The posting
In short We are establishing our first-ever Product Archive at our Zurich HQ and are ready to transition from vision to reality. We are looking for a visionary Product Archive Lead to spearhead this effort and drive it into its operational phase.
As an incredible self-starter with deep roots in the cultural sector, you will be the custodian of our Design heritage. With the Archive you will manage a dynamic, multi-faceted ecosystem: serving as an internal creative engine for our designers, an external-facing cultural landmark in the heart of Zurich, and a secure digital repository for our innovation. This is an opportunity to bridge our rich history with our future creative ambitions, turning our archive into a world-class inspiration hub.
Your Mission - Establish the Center of Competence: Define and execute a holistic archive strategy. You will develop the criteria for our collection, ensuring it serves as a rigorous, authoritative, and accessible knowledge base that fuels internal research and preserves our brand DNA for the long term. - Oversee Physical Stewardship: Manage the full lifecycle of our physical collections. This includes depot planning, organization, and qualification processes, as well as the identification and documentation of previously unrecorded object groups (shoes, textiles, accessories) and long-term conservation. - Drive Digital & Data Infrastructure: Architect our digital repository. You will lead the implementation and integration of archive databases, ensuring seamless data flow with internal systems, and overseeing metadata standards (keywording, photo documentation) to make our history searchable and usable. - Bridge the Past, Present, and Future: Partner with Design and Product teams to establish the archive as a functional, high-access creative engine. You will build the workflows that allow teams to search, borrow, and analyze historical product references, ensuring our past innovations directly inform and inspire current seasonal concepts. - Collaborate on Cultural Engagement: Partner with our exhibition programming team to position the archive as a cultural landmark. You will provide the necessary historical context, exhibit curation, and material expertise to bring our brand stories to life through internal and external showcases. - Operational Excellence: Manage the archive’s working budget, vendor relationships, and IT collaborations to ensure the archive functions as a high-performance, future-proof service.
Your story - Heritage & Cultural Expert: You possess a deep background in managing high-value archives, heritage collections, or design museums (6-8 years of experience). You are comfortable engaging with the cultural sector and understand how to translate institutional history into a compelling modern narrative. - Meticulous & Precise: Your approach is defined by rigorous organization. You thrive in the details of inventory management, documentation, and data standards, ensuring that every object in our care is perfectly accounted for and categorized. - Systems Thinker: You are as comfortable with database architecture as you are with physical conservation. You can define, implement, and maintain complex systems that ensure data flows seamlessly from our past into our digital tools. - Collaborative & Communicative: You are a natural bridge-builder. You possess the diplomacy to work across departments—from IT and Finance to Design and Marketing—and you thrive in a team environment where knowledge-sharing is the priority. - Narrative Driven: You excel at bringing our heritage to life, transforming archival records into compelling stories. You have a unique ability to uncover the "why" behind past design decisions and can translate that historical context into actionable, relevant insights for designers working today. - Strategic Self-Starter: You don’t wait for instructions to build a process. You are an autonomous project lead who can manage budgets, external vendors, and multi-year timelines with the agility required in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
About the Team You will report directly to the Chief of Staff (CoS) of Design, sitting at the heart of a vibrant and diverse Design Studio that drives On’s disruptive product design across footwear, apparel, and accessories. We are a team that values creativity, curiosity, and collaboration, and we are looking for someone who shares our passion for turning the "why" of our past into the "what's next" of our future.
