Driven By Design: How Kristen Keenan Brought Street Style To The 2025 Ford Maverick

From Nike sneakers to street trucks, Kristen Keenan has never been one to stick to convention. The Detroit-born designer has left her bold, colour-forward mark across industries—from tech and fashion to her current role at Ford Motor Company, where she’s redefining the automotive aesthetic with the 2025 Maverick lineup. We sat down with Keenan to talk graffiti-inspired interiors, unexpected inspiration, and how great design always starts with emotion. —Noa Nichol

Your career has spanned some of the most iconic brands in tech, fashion, and automotive. What drew you back to Ford—and to the Maverick project specifically?

I started my career at Ford, and although I loved working in other industries, I felt like I had unfinished business in automotive design. My first time at Ford, I worked on iconic vehicles like the first Raptor (which was an F-150 2010 Model Year) and the Shelby GT 500 Mustang. I loved working on Mustang and Trucks, and I dreamt about what more I could do from a design standpoint if I had future model years to work with. Bringing the growth that I’ve had working across multiple industries back to Ford has been so exciting. The Maverick LOBO, like the Raptor, is a white space vehicle, the first of its kind. Being asked to contribute to a project like the LOBO upon my return was exhilarating. I am living my dream of designing Mustangs and Trucks once again!

You’re known for bringing a layered, fashion-forward perspective to car interiors. How did your time at Nike influence your approach to automotive design?

My studies in Apparel Design at The Fashion Institute of Technology gave me a strong, fashion-focused foundation that I have carried with me throughout my career.  Designing at Nike built on that foundation by refining my ability to use materials as a method of storytelling. The storytelling at Nike was so detailed and thorough. That experience helps me to dive deep into the significance of colour and materials choices for vehicles today.

The 2025 Maverick features graffiti-inspired embossing and bold colours like Electric Lime and Grabber Blue. Can you walk us through the process of translating street culture into interior finishes? 

As a designer, I find that inspiration is all around me. I photograph colours, textures and materials that I keep in a mental (and digital) inspiration bank. For the Maverick LOBO, I recalled my time spent immersed in performance basketball and streetwear culture. I was on a trip to New York City and toured a (now defunct) graffiti park called 5 pointz. The mix of colours and textures there were so striking and so relevant, especially the bright blue and lime green. The following day, I saw the same blue and lime combination used for a street basketball court in Manhattan. Those images vividly came back to me when I began working on LOBO. While I was ideating on a way to include colour accents on the seats, I went directly to the mental image of the graffiti splatter textures and thought it would be a great way to bring a street feel into the truck.

What challenges or opportunities did you encounter when applying fashion and footwear design principles to car interiors? 

Each industry has their own testing methods for safety and performance. Automotive interiors can be particularly tricky to design for due to the airbags that are present in the interior. That is not something that I needed to keep in mind or work with designing apparel or footwear. A creative opportunity that presents itself in automotive design is the diversity of materials that I get to design and develop with. I love working with metal, wood, plastic, leather, fabric and paint simultaneously. Some apparel or footwear may have one of these as a component, but on a much smaller scale. Automotive paint, especially exterior paint, is an absolute dream to design! There is nothing like it in footwear or fashion. The colour space alone is so fun and inspiring to work on. The effects within the pigments or the metallic flake of the paint really makes the designer in me swoon.

You’ve designed everything from performance basketball shoes to smartphones and trucks—how do you adapt your creative process across such vastly different products?

Scale is so important when it comes to colours and materials. The same colours could work on any of these three products – but the ratio and application may need to be much different across them. The number of versions that a consumer owns can also come into play. Footwear is something that many consumers are likely to switch on a daily basis, to complement an outfit, for example. Since there may be six (or more!) pairs in the closet, the colour palette can be niche or playful- neutral or bold. A smartphone will likely stay with you day to day, regardless of what you are wearing- and may be covered with a phone case. A vehicle is something that the consumer may only have one of and will likely have for years- so it is all about finding the balance of alluring colours and materials that will also stand a longer test of time.

What role does storytelling play in your design process? Do you envision a narrative behind every material and colour choice?

Storytelling is a huge aspect of my design process. Colours evoke different moods and feelings and contribute so much to the vibe of the vehicle. I do believe that it is important to have a narrative behind every design choice- it makes it so meaningful to the consumer, elevates the design and serves as great inspiration for the designer.

As a woman in a traditionally male-dominated space, how do you bring fresh perspective to the automotive industry—and what does it mean to you to help redefine what a truck can look and feel like?  

In every position I have been in, it’s been true that sometimes I was the only woman in the room during a meeting or review. It was, and is, also true that I am usually the only person in the room with an apparel design background. The combination of the two make me see automotive design and the possibilities of what a truck can look like, through a much different lens. I am thrilled to say that I am not the only woman in the room as often during my second round at Ford. And regardless of who is in the room, I have found that my perspective is sought, heard and respected. It’s been wonderful to see the progress!

The Maverick’s design includes intuitive touchpoint accents. How do you think about the driver’s emotional and tactile experience when crafting an interior space? 

Colours and materials can add beauty to interior spaces, but they can also serve as visual communication. In architecture, they call it wayfinding.  I like to think of colour as a wayfinding tool for the driver. On the LOBO, colour draws your eyes to important touchpoints that also show you where your hands need to go. Door handle pulls, air vent controls, even the steering wheel. The soft touch and feel of those colour components further differentiate them from other parts of the interior, and create an elevated tactile experience.

You’ve lived and worked across North America—from Detroit to Waterloo, to Portland and back again. How have those different environments shaped your creative outlook?

I was exploring my artistic instinct growing up in the Detroit area from a very young age, throughout my teenage years. For me, The Detroit and Ann Arbor areas will always be tied to that feeling of limitless creative exploration- dabbling in anything that involved creating a physical object or thing of beauty. A drawing,  a photograph, a dress. It was all connected! Detroit had an amazing music scene, and I loved designing and sewing things to wear to the countless shows I frequented. I loved to bring my friends from art school in Ann Arbor to meet my friends in Detroit on the weekends for shows and creative events downtown and in the Cass Corridor. Living and working in Waterloo had an exciting, incubator-like feel. My time in Canada was extremely influential to me, both due to the talented Canadian designers I worked with, who I learned so much from, and for the exposure that I had to the global design scene. While working at BlackBerry, we collaborated with the product and furniture designer Tom Dixon for a joint exhibit during Milan’s Design Week. It was my first time attending, let alone exhibiting, and we had a wonderful mix of time to spend in our own exhibit and to thoroughly explore the city for colour and material trend research. It was a life-changing trip as a designer, and it set a high bar for me. Years later, in 2017, I returned to Milan Design Week with a dear friend and designer Bhavna Mistry who had just relocated back to Detroit from London, and we met two designers from Rotterdam, Fraai Werk and Noepster, who we had an instant connection with. The following year, we returned to exhibit, having collaborated with our new friends from Rotterdam and with our wonderful friend and designer Kylie Lockwood from Detroit throughout the year on an installation celebrating chance meetings and strangers connecting. It was an incredible experience. That first trip to Design Week from Ontario planted the seed for this eventual return and exhibition. Portland was such a unique experience creatively, because the products I helped to design at Nike were just as much for the athletes as they were for the consumer, which was unique in product design. I grew up as a basketball fan in Detroit, and it was so fun to jump back into that world- we attended many games, practices- even Olympic trials. Nike was also extremely performance-focused from a materials standpoint, technical knowledge which has stayed with me since. As a city, Portland is such a magnet for creatives, which was awesome to experience.

What excites you most about the future of automotive design, and how do you hope your work continues to push boundaries in form, function, and fashion? 

Colour trends and material technologies are always evolving and inspiring future design.  I have so much more to explore and design in the automotive space. I hope that my colour and material designs help bring fashion to the forefront of the products that I work on. I am working passionately behind the scenes and can’t wait for you to see what else is in my pipeline at Ford!