To respect Kyrie’s unexpected game and demonstrate how the shoe enables his creativity on the court we selected a handful of Kyrie’s favorite moves he unleashes on the court and created a unique brand and limited edition shoebox for each, matched with a unique colorway of the Kyrie2.

Each Unexpected Move was given a unique visual brand incorporating Kyrie’s creative personality, his unexpectedness on the court and a Kyrie2 colorway. To bring the themes and moves to life, we created content designed for earned media ranging from short films to unboxing Vines. We partnered with artists to create bespoke shoeboxes, designed exclusively to gift to key influencers. Each box housed a new Kyrie2 colorway, Kyrie branded collector’s item and a personalized letter from Kyrie.

Over the course of five months, seven Kyrie2 drops were launched from Nike and Kyrie's social channels with short films of Kyrie introducing each new move and colorway. We used the unique performance elements of Kyrie’s game to deepen our consumer’s identity to the footwear performance. The Kyrie 2’s branded moves becomes so culturally embedded in the vernacular of performance the NBA participated in one of the branded moves, the Kyrie Inferno.

This new approach proved highly successful for the Kyrie2, and has lead to an entirely new model for how Nike Basketball approaches signature shoe launches from both a targeting, creative and media standpoint.

Using only Nike Basketball’s owned channels we were able to reach over 105 million (105,859,108), with 3+million views of the the video content and 1+million additional content engagements (1,056,932).

In addition, our influencer strategy (including Kyrie himself) boosted our reach by over 13+million (13,138,548) with 947k engagements coming from content they created for their followers inspired by our custom boxes.

Unexpected Moves also earned its way into culture with campaign content picked up by major players in not only the basketball and sneaker categories, but mass media outlets including Complex, USA Today and posted by the NBA itself.