There’s a little bit of Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James tucked inside the 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo, Ford’s first street-style truck in decades. The compact truck’s profile and body is styled after the low-riding trucks of the 1980s and ’90s, but its interior owes much more of its look to some of the biggest superstars of the NBA. Or at least to their shoes.
The Lobo’s interior was designed by Kristen Keenan, a color and material designer at Ford who, for several years before taking her current role, designed performance basketball shoes for Nike. That included working directly with major NBA players like Bryant, Durant, and James to turn their visions for their personal branded shoes into reality.
Keenan’s experience designing pro basketball shoes was an unexpectedly useful background for the Maverick Lobo design project. Its designers embraced the roots of the lowrider scene that inspired the truck, tapping into street culture and an urban aesthetic that departed from the chrome and leather look of a conventional truck. “It was the perfect opportunity to bring in some of those streetwear cues,” Keenan says.
That opened up some overlaps with her work in basketball shoes. She drew on a common splatter paint coloring technique that’s used in the soles of some basketball shoes and translated that into a kind of graffiti spray coloring on the seats in the truck. “It’s almost like an Easter egg, but it’s right in plain sight,” she says.
Keenan also pulled from her experience working on the team that designed Bryant’s Kobe 9 shoes. The release of the shoe in early 2014 was partly delayed by Bryant tearing his achilles tendon. At age 35, it could have been career-ender, thereby complicating the marketing of the shoe. But Bryant recovered and played again the next season, and the shoe moved ahead, with one small addition. Bryant suggested that stitches be added to the back of the shoe in the exact spot where he had surgery on his achilles, done up in bright red—calling out the injury, but also the recovery. He also wanted those red stitches to show up on every colorway of the shoe, no matter how clashing.
Bryant’s bold approach inspired Keenan’s work on the Ford Maverick Lobo design. She decided to try an atypical color combination for the stitching on the seats: bright “grabber blue” and neon-glowing “electric lime.” The glaring color combination is used in every colorway of the Lobo. The thin stitching is a small piece of the truck, but one that speaks to the unconventional design inspiration behind the product. “I’m so happy I got away with it,” Keenan says.