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Ford Color and Materials Designer Kristen Keenan, a former Nike basketball shoe creator, channeled her love of fashion and footwear when choosing the color and materials for the new Maverick Lobo.
Ford Color and Materials Designer Kristen Keenan, a Detroit-area native born at a hospital near Ford’s design center, was destined to work for the Blue Oval. But it was a stint at another iconic American company which helped inspire her work on the new Ford Maverick.
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The new 2025 Ford Maverick includes a new street truck trim series for the midsize pickup.
Keenan graduated from the University of Michigan in 2002 before studying apparel design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where product design and fashion design courses “kind of melded everything together for me.” She joined Ford in 2004 but would later leave for a role at Nike, where she collaborated on signature performance shoes with superstar basketball players, including LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Kobe Bryant. Keenan, who returned to Ford in 2019, has also worked as a color, material, and finishes designer at BlackBerry.
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Keenan helped create the Kobe IX “Masterpiece” colorway basketball shoe while working at Nike in 2014.
Performance vehicles, such as the first-generation F-150 Raptor and two generations of the Mustang Shelby GT500, served as early canvases for Keenan in her Ford career. In addition to the new Maverick Lobo, Keenan also works on other vehicles across the Ford lineup, including Mustang, Bronco, Bronco Sport, and Ranger, as well as special editions.
“You name it, and I’m having some kind of fun working on it,” she said.
Maverick gets street cred
Keenan was eager to lend her talents to the interior of the Maverick Lobo, the new street truck trim series for the midsize pickup. When she was choosing the different hues and materials for Lobo, Keenan was inspired by her time designing high-end footwear and highly sought-after special-edition sneakers.
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Keenan poses with Maverick Exterior Designer Josh Blundo at the truck’s Miami reveal last month.
“I was so excited to work on a project like this because it’s a lowered, street-style type of truck,” she said. “It’s a segment I haven’t been able to touch so far in automotive design. That alone made it very exciting to work on. There was a strong similarity, inspiration-wise, for the colors and materials on the interior and exterior color and materials just like I had at Nike working on performance basketball shoes.”
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Maverick’s interior design reflects trends in streetwear such as this Grabber Blue and Electric Lime pairing in the pickup’s accent stitching.
Maverick Lobo includes Grabber Blue and Electric Lime accent stitching, a unique color pairing that serves as an homage to streetwear trends, as well as a graffiti-inspired overprint on the seats, another nod to street culture. Lobo comes in two configurations: standard and high, which allows Maverick customers to choose the amount of personalization they can make with their truck.
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Kristen Keenan and her mother, Betty Ray, are pictured at home in this photo from August.
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Betty Ray, mother of Ford Color and Materials Designer Kristen Keenan, is seen here with her 1969 Mustang.
Keenan’s mother, Betty Ray, worked at Ford in the late-1960s and passed down her love of Mustang to her children, particularly Kristen.
“That was her baby,” said Keenan, who now owns a 2022 model in Grabber Blue. “She loved that car, and I heard about it so much growing up. Sadly, she doesn’t have it anymore, but I always had that love of Mustang that my mom loved to talk about. And now I’m a very proud second-generation female Mustang owner myself.”
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Betty Ray works on her Mustang, a photo Keenan would like to recreate with her own Mustang.
Betty Ray made the road trip across the state of Michigan with Kristen to retrieve her daughter’s new car a few years ago and followed Kristen home.
“It was very emotional,” Kristen said of the journey, noting that she hopes to re-create photos of her mother with the 1969 model with her own Mustang.
Captured by Grabber Blue
While Keenan is perpetually struggling to name her Mustang – she names all of her vehicles, including a Bronco Sport she has dubbed “Bronquito” – Keenan is more decisive about the color selection. Her nameless Mustang also features Grabber Blue in the interior stitching. She fell in love with the shade as a color and materials designer on the 2010 Mustang Shelby GT500, when she developed a Grabber Blue thread and leather to be sewn into the seats of the car to match the racing stripes on its hood. She is delighted to have that same color in her personal Mustang today.
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Keenan introduces her two children and mother, Betty Ray to the Bronco Sport Freewheeling project in Detroit in 2023 after working on the project.
There’s also a historical connection to the color. It debuted in 1969, the same model year of the mythical Mustang that helped connect Keenan to the car (though her mother’s car was Lime Gold Metallic, a color Ford has long discontinued).
“I love my Mustang so much,” Keenan said. “Every time I get to drive it to Flat Rock Assembly Plant, I always say ‘we get to go to your birthplace today,” she said.
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Keenan is also a proud second-generation female Mustang owner.
While basketball shoes are not what you might expect as the motivation behind the design of a new street-inspired trim series for the midsize Ford Maverick, inspiration can come from unexpected places. As Keenan continues to help shape new and stunning vehicles for Ford, she also carries the spirit of her mother and the legacy of the Mustang with her.
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