Ford’s new off-road truck incorporates a little DNA from Nike basketball shoes
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There’s a little bit of Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James packed inside the 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo, Ford’s first street-style pickup truck in decades. The compact truck’s profile and body are styled after the pickup trucks of the 1980s and ’90s, but its interior owes its looks to some of the NBA’s greatest champions. Or at least in their shoes.
Lobo’s interior was designed by Kristen Keenan, a color and material designer at Ford who, several years before assuming her current role, designed performance basketball shoes for Nike. That included working directly with NBA superstars like Bryant, Durant, and James to turn their visions of their original shoes into reality.
Keenan’s experience designing pro basketball shoes was an unexpected asset for the Maverick Lobo design project. Its designers embraced the roots of the lowrider scene that inspired the truck, tapping into street culture and urban aesthetics from the chrome and leather look of the classic truck. “It was a great opportunity to bring some of those streetwear brands,” Keenan said.
That opened up some overlap with his career in basketball shoes. He drew on the traditional splatter paint technique used on the soles of basketball shoes and translated that into a type of graffiti spray paint on truck seats. He says: “It’s almost like an Easter egg but it’s obvious.”
Keenan also shared his experience working on the team that designed Bryant’s Kobe 9 shoes. The release of the shoe in early 2014 was delayed in part by Bryant tearing his achilles tendon. When I was 35, it could have been a career-ender, thus making the sale of the shoe difficult. But Bryant recovered and played again the following season, and the shoe moved on, with one minor addition. Bryant suggested having stitches placed in the back of the shoe where he had his achilles surgery, done in bright red—suggesting injury, but also recovery. He also wanted those red stitches to be visible in every color of the shoe, no matter how they clashed.
Bryant’s bold style inspired Keenan’s design work for the Ford Maverick Lobo. He decided to try an unusual color combination for the stitching on the seats: bright “blue” and bright “electric lime”. A glossy color combination is used in every Lobo color. The small seam is a small piece of the truck, but it speaks to the unusual design inspiration behind the product. “I’m very happy that I won,” said Keenan.
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