Nike × JD Sports
Global Air
Collective
Creative Director + Product Design · Ona Creative · 2024
JD Sports leds the Air Max portfolio globally — everywhere but America. The brief: make JD Sports the home of Air Max in the US, where mainstream culture writes the rules of streetwear. After a lot of market research, our answer wasn’t a campaign — it was a collective. I led a team to build the Global Air Collective: a route into real culture across America through co-creation with relavent artists. By the culture, for the culture.
We anchored our first cast with one of the most influential producers in music, Metro Boomin, then built a roster of rising artists around him: Rico Nasty, Denzel Curry, Flyana Boss, Monaleo, Westside Boogie, Audrey Nuna, and iamsu!. We didn’t cast on follower count — we researched how engaged each artist’s community actually was.
I set the direction and the brief; the artists and the local creators around them brought it to life in their own voice.
Four things went out per artist — the rider that invited them in, the illusion portrait, the shoot in their own city, and the Air Max pack. Everything rolled out where culture actually lives: their channels, JD’s channels, and JD’s Air Max landing page.
Every artist was sent an artist rider — the seeding kit, reimagined. That was my idea: not a box of product, but a rider like the ones artists get on tour. I designed the world it carried — the Global Air Collective logo, the varsity jackets, the members’ passes, and every element inside, sourced and designed down to the last detail.
The Air Max Dn campaign line was Feel Air Unreal, so the first shoot had to make “unreal” something you could actually see. I gave every artist a superpower.
Each one was built as an optical illusion staged around the thing that artist is known for — so the trick was never a filter applied afterwards, it was constructed in front of the camera and specific to them. Their superpower, and the DNA of the shoe, in the same frame.
Then we went back out and shot each artist in their own city, with their own community in frame. The collective only works if the people around these artists are in it too — otherwise it is a casting list, not a culture.
The last drop was a custom space pack — an intergalactic package I designed to carry the new Air Max Dn out to each artist.
It got its own shoot rather than riding along with the others. The pack was a product in its own right, and it needed to be shot like one.
The posts as they actually ran on the artists’ own channels — in their voice, to their own audience, with their community answering back in the comments.
The same work, rebuilt for JD’s own surfaces — homepage heroes, category tiles and the Air Max landing page, desktop and mobile.
When Rico Nasty joined the collective, I designed her a 'Burn Book' — a physical scrapbook of everything that had happened in the collective so far. She marked it up, made it hers, and added herself to the story.
The motion work that ran alongside the stills — the cuts that actually went out.