There’s just a little little bit of Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James tucked contained in the 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo, Ford’s first street-style truck in a long time. The compact truck’s profile and physique is styled after the low-riding vans of the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, however its inside owes way more of its look to a few of the largest superstars of the NBA. Or a minimum of to their sneakers.
The Lobo’s inside was designed by Kristen Keenan, a coloration and materials designer at Ford who, for a number of years earlier than taking her present position, designed efficiency basketball sneakers for Nike. That included working straight with main NBA gamers like Bryant, Durant, and James to show their visions for his or her private branded sneakers into actuality.
Keenan’s expertise designing professional basketball sneakers was an unexpectedly helpful background for the Maverick Lobo design venture. Its designers embraced the roots of the lowrider scene that impressed the truck, tapping into avenue tradition and an city aesthetic that departed from the chrome and leather-based look of a standard truck. “It was the proper alternative to herald a few of these streetwear cues,” Keenan says.
That opened up some overlaps along with her work in basketball sneakers. She drew on a typical splatter paint coloring approach that’s used within the soles of some basketball sneakers and translated that right into a type of graffiti spray coloring on the seats within the truck. “It’s nearly like an Easter egg nevertheless it’s proper in plain sight,” she says.
Keenan additionally pulled from her expertise engaged on the crew that designed Bryant’s Kobe 9 sneakers. The discharge of the shoe in early 2014 was partly delayed by Bryant tearing his achilles tendon. At age 35, it might have been career-ender, thereby complicating the advertising of the shoe. However Bryant recovered and performed once more the following season, and the shoe moved forward, with one small addition. Bryant urged that stitches be added to the back of the shoe within the actual spot the place he had surgical procedure on his achilles, performed up in brilliant crimson—calling out the damage, but additionally the restoration. He additionally needed these crimson stitches to indicate up on each colorway of the shoe, irrespective of how clashing.
Bryant’s daring method impressed Keenan’s work on the Ford Maverick Lobo design. She determined to strive an atypical coloration mixture for the stitching on the seats: brilliant “grabber blue” and neon-glowing “electrical lime.” The evident coloration mixture is utilized in each colorway of the Lobo. The skinny stitching is a small piece of the truck, however one which speaks to the unconventional design inspiration behind the product. “I’m so joyful I obtained away with it,” Keenan says.