B/R Kicks was not an inherited brand extension or a lightly repackaged vertical. I co-founded it as a ground up cultural platform inside Bleacher Report, identifying a gap between legacy sneaker media’s gatekept tone and the participatory, identity driven behavior emerging across social platforms. As Creative Lead and Multimedia Director, I defined the north star: build an ownable voice that treated sneakers not as commodities, but as semiotic artifacts embedded in sport, music, design, and street level self expression. I established the brand architecture, naming conventions, editorial pillars, and visual system to ensure the platform could scale across video, social, web, and experiential environments without losing cultural fidelity. From a design systems perspective, I built the look and feel to balance editorial credibility with social native immediacy. This meant developing motion templates, typography hierarchies, color logic, lower thirds, and thumbnail systems optimized for feed velocity and thumb stop performance. I codified a modular toolkit that allowed small teams to produce high volume content while maintaining visual coherence, effectively operationalizing taste. The voice was intentionally pluralistic, shifting away from the monolithic sneakerhead archetype toward a multi entry narrative framework that welcomed athletes, designers, stylists, gamers, and everyday fans. This repositioning expanded the addressable audience and aligned the brand with youth culture’s fluid identity politics. On the content side, I programmed the platform end to end. I built the editorial calendar, defined franchise formats, and established repeatable content IP that could travel across Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and on site distribution. I directed and shot original video, from locker room interviews to street level style docs, ensuring that production language felt embedded rather than extractive. I wrote and edited long form and short form pieces that connected product drops to broader cultural moments, reframing releases as narrative events rather than transactional hype cycles. By integrating real time social listening into our programming cadence, we were able to respond to micro trends and community discourse with speed and authenticity.Critically, I positioned B/R Kicks as an interaction layer rather than a broadcast channel. We designed prompts, polls, and user generated features that invited the audience to co author the culture, turning comment sections into signal rather than noise. This participatory loop informed future content, creating a feedback system that kept the brand culturally literate and self renewing.
"I really f*ck with what you guys are doing at B/R Kicks." - Kyrie Irving
The most formidable challenge in launching Bleacher Report Kicks was not creating content but building a durable audience for a net new brand within an ecosystem saturated with sports coverage and legacy verticals. We were asking fans to expand their perception of Bleacher Report from a scores and highlights destination into a credible voice in sneaker and style culture, a space historically shaped by niche forums, boutique blogs, and tightly guarded insider communities. Establishing legitimacy required precision. The tone could not feel opportunistic, the visuals could not feel templated, and the programming could not mimic incumbents. Every post functioned as a trust building exercise, and any misstep risked reinforcing skepticism that a mainstream publisher could participate authentically in sneaker discourse. My approach was intentionally full stack. I operated as community manager, creative director, content strategist, and editorial lead, keeping the voice coherent across touchpoints while we tested formats and cadence. I published in real time using engagement signals as live research to refine taxonomy and posting rhythms, while developing franchises, directing video, and leading art direction to build an engine that balanced immediacy with depth. Because Kicks functioned as a startup inside Bleacher Report, much of this work happened as a skunkworks effort alongside core duties, requiring lightweight workflows, templated production systems, and contributor pipelines that scaled output without added headcount. A parallel challenge was defining a voice that was authoritative yet inclusive. Sneaker culture often rewards exclusivity, but growth depended on welcoming newcomers discovering the space through athletes, music, and streetwear. I calibrated a tone that provided context without condescension, translating release details into cultural narratives and framing style as self expression rather than status signaling, which broadened the audience while preserving credibility with core enthusiasts. To sustain originality at scale, I built a network of artists, illustrators, photographers, and motion designers whose culturally fluent work became a force multiplier and some of our highest performing content, proving that co creation outperforms top down broadcasting. On the programming side, I launched and produced flagship series such as Sneaker Shock and the athlete driven Unboxed, translating digital hype into tangible, shareable experiences that attracted brand partners and aligned with commerce moments. This approach converted engagement into revenue, scaling the vertical from zero to more than twenty million dollars annually in under three years and validating that a design led, voice driven, community first strategy that is built by sneakerheads for sneakerheads can turn cultural participation into a sustainable media business.
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For many kids growing up, one of the biggest things that we all covet is the new signature shoes of our favorite athletes, and we place almost a mythical status on these items. We imbue upon them our hopes and dreams, hoping that these shoes will make us fly like our favorite athletes can. We grow up with these desires and when we finally have the money to acquire some of these holy grails us sneaker heads often go in. It is a shared rite of passage, almost a coming of age badge. BR Kicks distills that feeling into the content that fans want to see and taps into that shared coming of age story we associate with sneaker culture, especially in an era where the NBA pregame tunnel has become a bonefied fashion runway. BR Kicks was a progression for our brand both from an editorial and cultural perspective.
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This spirit is a common thread among so many of us, an understanding of the accessibility of sneakers and a shared knowledge of the storytelling behind each silhouette or color way. A shared experience of waiting out in a line for sneakers or more recently taking an L on the Confirmed or SNKRS apps. Being a sneaker head is just about as much a bonding experience as being a fan, thus enter Bleacher Report. Having built out larger aspects of our social program I was motivated to push the appetite for sneaker content and found ways to make that a reality through various means. Eventually as these ideas became a reality and we had more and more data points accumulated I was able to pitch the concept with a group of co-workers similarly passionate about Kicks and we were able to get backing to make it a more serious pursuit.
What began as an organic extension of that shared culture quickly turned into an opportunity to build something more structured and scalable. Starting from zero, I helped develop what would become B/R Kicks into a dedicated vertical, growing it from an idea into a platform that reached over a million followers across social. The early phase required a hands-on approach across everything from content direction and visual identity to programming, partnerships, and distribution strategy. As traction built, the focus shifted from experimentation to refinement, using data and audience behavior to shape a more defined voice and consistent output. With that growth came the need to evolve the brand itself, ensuring it could sustain momentum without becoming repetitive or diluted. The rebrand was not about changing direction, but about formalizing what was already working, creating a clearer system, sharper identity, and a foundation that could support long-term relevance within an increasingly crowded space.
Under my leadership, B/R Kicks evolved into a strategic pillar within the Bleacher Report ecosystem, expanding from a niche editorial vertical into a fully realized media platform that connected sport, style, and youth culture. What began as coverage of sneaker releases grew into a broader cultural engine that translated the language of the sneaker community into a format that could scale across social, editorial, and brand partnerships. By treating design not simply as decoration but as infrastructure and as a core part of the template and social strategy, we built a cohesive visual and storytelling system that allowed the brand to move fluidly across platforms while maintaining credibility with the audience that defined the culture in the first place. This allowed us to retain our original voice while building a space for brands as well.
This design led, systems driven approach allowed B/R Kicks to function as both a content engine and a commercial platform. The brand attracted meaningful partnerships, drove consistent engagement across Bleacher Report’s social channels, and proved that subculture could be amplified without being diluted. Rather than flattening the nuance of sneaker culture into generic sports content, the goal was to respect the community’s visual language, history, and storytelling rhythms while building something that could live comfortably within a large media organization. In doing so, B/R Kicks demonstrated how thoughtful creative direction can transform a cultural niche into a scalable media property that resonates with audiences, brands, and the broader sports ecosystem.
People wear these kicks like badges of honor. Each pair carries a narrative about identity, aspiration, allegiance, and taste. Footwear becomes a semiotic layer through which individuals signal belonging and distinction at the same time. I have always been fascinated by how something ostensibly functional can operate as a deeply personal artifact, a wearable archive of influences that spans sport, music, geography, and memory. Translating that emotional bandwidth into media meant recognizing sneakers not as products to be covered, but as stories to be decoded and retold through a culturally fluent lens.
Tapping into that raw emotional current, I helped launch the B/R Kicks sub brand with the intention of building a platform that honored the plurality of those stories while creating a scalable content engine. We treated every drop, fit, and on court moment as an entry point into broader conversations about identity and self expression, which allowed the vertical to resonate beyond core collectors. This approach helped transform B/R Kicks into a meaningful driver of engagement and revenue, ultimately becoming a staple of Bleacher Report’s content ecosystem and a proof point for how culture led storytelling can translate into sustainable business impact.
BR Kicks is one of Turner Sports fastest growing digital properties across the entire Warner Media portfolio with a unique point of view and a bootstrapped origin story where the department grew out of an organic passion and felt natural as an evolution for so much of what we were doing on social. I think disruption is a fundamental aspect of what we were able to do with our rapid response social moments playbook I was a part of developing, and applying and growing that through the kicks vertical was a game changer.
What made B/R Kicks particularly powerful was that it reframed sneaker coverage from a niche editorial beat into a scalable cultural operating system inside the broader Bleacher Report ecosystem. Instead of treating footwear as a product category to report on, we approached it as a connective tissue linking sport, music, fashion, design, and identity, allowing the platform to speak to multiple communities simultaneously. That perspective transformed the vertical from a simple content stream into a cultural signal generator capable of responding to moments in real time while also producing deeper storytelling around design lineage, athlete expression, and style.
The speed and intuition of the social moments playbook gave us the ability to move with the internet, but pairing that velocity with thoughtful creative systems and editorial frameworks is what allowed the brand to compound over time. In practice, this meant building an engine where a single cultural spark, whether it was a tunnel fit, a surprise drop, or an athlete co sign, could cascade across social posts, video series, editorial features, and community conversation. The result was a platform that operated less like a traditional media vertical and more like a living cultural node inside the sports world. By embedding ourselves directly within the rhythms of sneaker culture, we were able to transform fleeting moments of hype into durable audience relationships and long term brand equity. That combination of cultural fluency, creative direction, and systems thinking is ultimately what allowed B/R Kicks to become not just a fast growing account, but a defining part of how Bleacher Report participates in modern sports culture.
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Bleacher Report Kicks began as a passion project I initiated with a small group of colleagues, conceived as a cultural meeting ground where athletes, musicians, influencers, and fans could converge around sneaker culture beyond the confines of the court. We were interested in documenting and decoding the emerging phenomenon of the stadium tunnel as the new men’s runway, where pregame arrivals functioned as ritualized displays of identity, taste, and brand alignment.
The goal was to create a platform that treated these moments not as disposable content but as signals of a broader shift in how sport, fashion, and lifestyle were converging in real time. Operating with limited resources, we built the vertical as a nimble, experimental layer within Bleacher Report, testing formats, tone, and visual systems while maintaining cultural fluency. What began as a side project quickly revealed itself as a strategic opportunity to expand the brand’s relevance with younger, style conscious audiences. By centering storytelling over hype, we established a voice that felt embedded in the culture rather than adjacent to it.
B/R Kicks represented more than the launch of a new editorial vertical. It opened a strategic pathway for Bleacher Report to extend beyond highlights, scores, and breaking news into a more valuable layer of culture shaped by identity, aspiration, and consumer behavior. Sneaker culture already sat at the intersection of sport, music, design, and self expression, which made it one of the clearest adjacencies for expanding the company’s relevance with younger audiences.
What I recognized early was that footwear was not simply a product category to cover, but a language through which fans communicated taste, allegiance, and belonging. That insight reframed the opportunity from content production into brand expansion. By treating sneakers as a cultural operating system rather than a commerce beat, we were able to build a platform that felt native to both fandom and lifestyle. This gave Bleacher Report a stronger foothold in the daily habits of audiences whose relationship to sport extended well beyond the final score. In that sense, B/R Kicks was not a side project but a strategic growth vector that broadened the company’s editorial perimeter and long term commercial potential. It really became a true success story that gave BR Hoops, HighlightHer (Later BR W), Gridiron, Ice, Walkoff, College Football or BR Football a guide.
As the platform scaled, B/R Kicks evolved into an integral part of Bleacher Report’s business portfolio, opening new pathways for monetization, brand partnerships, and content experimentation. We demonstrated that sneaker culture could serve as a bridge between sports media and consumer lifestyle, unlocking sponsorship opportunities and commerce integrations that extended beyond traditional advertising models. The vertical also elevated Bleacher Report’s overall social presence, lending it a level of cultural credibility that deepened audience affinity and trust. Our ability to translate tunnel fits, player exclusives, and community style into high performing content created a feedback loop between culture and commerce that benefited the broader ecosystem. Internally, the success of Kicks validated a more agile, creator led approach to brand building that informed future vertical launches. And yes, the Instagram account became a destination in its own right, with a distinct voice and energy that audiences showed up for daily.
I was lucky enough to wear many hats as I helped grow the brand and raise the bar as far as the content offerings that not only Bleacher Report, but Turner and NBA digital from a larger perspective would offer going forward. BR Kicks fundamentally shifted our ability to appeal to a brand new younger cooler and more informed demographic. BR Kicks was able to grow to become one of the definite voices in the sneaker media space and will only continue to be a bigger part of Bleacher Report's future plans. With it's unique POV and an even more unique set of users who are highly engaged and ready to discuss and engage with content and giveaway at a much higher clip than most of our other fans or followers the brand is a strong place to try out new things and to learn more about them as well.
From the outset, my role was to define a clear creative and strategic north star for the brand. I wanted B/R Kicks to feel authoritative without becoming exclusionary, and contemporary without collapsing into trend chasing. That required establishing a voice that could decode sneaker culture for newcomers while still rewarding the fluency of core enthusiasts. I framed the brand around the idea that sneakers were narrative artifacts, not simply objects of consumption, which allowed every post, video, and feature to connect product moments to broader conversations in sport, fashion, and youth identity.
This point of view became foundational to how we programmed content, selected talent, structured editorial coverage, and developed recurring franchises. It also created a much larger addressable audience because the brand could speak to athletes, designers, artists, musicians, and everyday fans through a shared emotional logic. The result was a platform with an ownable editorial posture and a clearer reason to exist within an increasingly crowded media landscape. That clarity of intent is what allowed the brand to scale without losing its center of gravity.
A major part of the work involved translating taste into a scalable brand system. I helped build a modular identity framework that could stretch across social, video, web, live activations, and partner integrations while still remaining instantly recognizable as B/R Kicks. This included establishing the visual logic for motion, typography, thumbnails, lower thirds, quote cards, editorial illustrations, and franchise packaging so the brand could move quickly without sacrificing coherence. In practical terms, the system allowed a relatively small team to produce content with the consistency and presence of a much larger operation.
More importantly, it created trust with the audience because the work carried a stable point of view even as formats evolved. I have always believed that design systems are not simply efficiency tools but vehicles for preserving brand intent at scale. That belief was central here because feed environments reward immediacy, but only durable identity creates recall. By operationalizing the visual and editorial language of B/R Kicks, I helped turn a passion driven concept into a repeatable multi platform media product.
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Creating original content, coordinating strategy with Christian Pierre and Oruny Choi who would work as social content programmers for Kicks my role was to create original content for the team, build out quote cards or video series, produce and art direct original illustrations and animations, while also assisting day to day curating and posting on our social accounts, particularly instagram where we saw much of our growth. This core team really saw the bulk of the growth of the brand together through the years and saw it mature into one of the most integral aspects of our overall sports and culture coverage for Bleacher Report.
I had the opportunity to build the BR Kicks sub brand from the ground up, from it's very first instagram post on social to over 2 Million followers on the platform. Along the way I got to work on a number of social projects, series and shoots, animations, illustrations, motion design projects, and unboxing videos. Seeing the brand grow from what it what it once was, a passion project started by myself and a group of other sneaker heads to a viable portfolio brand with multiple monetization opportunities on social, owned and operated platforms, and experimental activations was an extremely enriching experience.
Another major dimension of the brand was its role in expanding Bleacher Report’s overall cultural credibility. B/R Kicks gave the company permission to participate more fully in the conversations happening around tunnel style, athlete self presentation, design culture, and the wider fashionization of sports. That mattered because the future of sports media was already moving away from purely game centered coverage and toward a broader understanding of fandom as identity performance. By building a platform that could move comfortably between sneaker history, player style, design breakdowns, artist collaborations, and community humor, we helped signal that Bleacher Report understood where culture was going rather than simply where it had been.
This raised the ceiling of the parent brand as much as it strengthened the vertical itself. Internally, it showed that emerging properties could be incubated through design led thinking, creator networks, and clear editorial positioning rather than through scale alone. Externally, it increased trust with athletes, brands, and audiences who were looking for media companies that spoke the language of culture with greater nuance. In that sense, B/R Kicks functioned as both a high growth brand and a strategic credibility layer for the wider business. The audience growth and business outcomes gave that thesis concrete proof. What began as a scrappy internal initiative evolved into one of the fastest growing culture facing properties in the Turner Sports portfolio, adding more than 4.5 million social followers and scaling to over $20 million in annual revenue.
Those numbers mattered, but what mattered even more was what they represented. They showed that a design led, systems driven, community first brand could compete in a crowded space without relying on legacy authority or inherited relevance. They validated the idea that there was substantial demand for a more participatory, emotionally intelligent, and culturally literate approach to sneaker media. They also reinforced that the most effective media brands of the next era would need to operate as ecosystems, not channels. B/R Kicks achieved that by combining taste, access, speed, repeatable IP, and a strong point of view into a platform audiences returned to daily. For me, the growth story is ultimately a reflection of strategic clarity translated into execution at scale.
It truly pushed me to the limit as far as utilizing every one of the skills in my design toolbar and taught me how to scale a brand from a small scrappy solo operation to a massive company defining brand that changes the trajectory of our mission statement. Growing the BR Kicks brand was a monumental achievement and I am proud to be a part of that effort. I truly believe it is an integral part of the Bleacher Report ecosystem and will continue to be a large part of BR's overall digital strategy for years to come.
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While developing the Team Stream app the main model to create a community was to develop an individualized stream for content specific to a team or fandom. As we worked on expanding the topics that users could follow on the stream, we developed a Kicks stream. Initially we were curating content around Kicks from the internet and other publishers. Slowly we began aggregating more of this content and developing basic news coverage around releases and sneaker moments in sports. This Kicks stream in our app grew exponentially to become on of the most subscribed amongst even all of the team and sports streams.
As the brand grew, my function increasingly became one of cross functional leadership and creative orchestration. I was often serving as connective tissue across editorial, design, programming, video, production, talent, partnerships, and commercial stakeholders, aligning each discipline around a shared standard for what B/R Kicks needed to be. That meant moving fluidly between concept development, franchise strategy, art direction, production problem solving, creator management, and go to market thinking. I was not only making work but building the operating model that made the work possible.
In a startup like environment inside a larger organization, that kind of leadership matters because momentum can easily fragment without a unifying vision. My contribution was helping the team stay culturally sharp while also building the systems and decision making frameworks that supported scale. I helped create enough clarity around the brand’s voice, design language, and programming priorities that collaborators could contribute without diluting the identity. That is the kind of leadership I value most because it turns individual taste into organizational capability.
On the content side, I approached B/R Kicks as a portfolio of repeatable intellectual property rather than a sequence of isolated posts. We developed a programming philosophy that balanced evergreen storytelling, real time response, access driven talent formats, short form social experimentation, and deeper editorial features so the brand could operate with both immediacy and depth. My focus was on building franchises that had enough flexibility to travel across platforms while still remaining distinct in the audience’s mind. This is where the brand began to feel more like a network than an account.
Series like unboxings, athlete conversations, community formats, and design focused features were not only creative executions but parts of a broader architecture that increased retention, diversified audience entry points, and created more surface area for sponsorship and distribution. I wanted the slate to reflect the full emotional spectrum of sneaker culture, from aspiration and nostalgia to humor, debate, curiosity, and technical appreciation. That multi format ecosystem is what allowed B/R Kicks to deepen audience affinity rather than merely chase episodic spikes. It also reinforced the idea that strong creative strategy is often less about any single hit and more about the system that produces consistent cultural relevance over time.
One of the most valuable strategic advantages behind B/R Kicks was its ability to create a true cross platform flywheel. Because the brand lived across social channels, owned and operated product surfaces, editorial experiences, notifications, and experiential moments, we were able to build a tighter feedback loop between discovery, engagement, and return behavior. I had already seen how powerful personalized streams and platform specific programming could be inside the broader Bleacher Report ecosystem, and B/R Kicks gave us a chance to apply those lessons to a highly activated audience vertical.
Sneaker culture is uniquely responsive to urgency, timing, and scarcity, which made it especially well suited to app integrations, release reminders, and push driven engagement. That gave us an edge because we were not only covering culture but distributing it through an ecosystem built for habitual interaction. The result was a more durable relationship with the audience, since content could move from feed to product to community conversation in a continuous loop. From a strategy standpoint, this was important because it linked creative output to platform behavior and deepened the enterprise value of the brand. B/R Kicks was effective not simply because the content resonated, but because the distribution model amplified and compounded that resonance.
One of the most important responsibilities I carried in building B/R Kicks was establishing a coherent brand governance structure that ensured the platform could scale without losing its voice. As the audience grew across multiple social networks, the risk was fragmentation, where different contributors, editors, or producers could unintentionally dilute the tone or visual language. I approached this challenge the same way one would approach the stewardship of any emerging media brand, by defining a clear set of editorial pillars, visual rules, and storytelling frameworks that acted as guardrails for the work. These guidelines covered everything from typography and motion logic to caption tone, meme cadence, and how we referenced sneaker history or athlete influence.
The goal was not to constrain creativity but to create a shared grammar that allowed collaborators to move quickly while still producing work that felt unmistakably B/R Kicks. I regularly reviewed content output, refined templates, and worked closely with designers, editors, and social programmers to ensure the brand’s standards were maintained across every platform. This type of governance became increasingly important as the account grew and new contributors joined the workflow. Ultimately, establishing a strong governance structure allowed the brand to expand its output while preserving the cultural credibility that audiences expected from it. In moments where competing ideas surfaced, the framework provided clarity rather than chaos, a quiet but essential bulwark against creative entropy. The entire system functioned as a kind of institutional memory for the brand, a living document of intent that ensured every new piece of work remained legible within the larger narrative.
Creative direction for B/R Kicks required translating an instinctive understanding of sneaker culture into a set of scalable visual and editorial systems. Rather than relying on ad hoc design choices, I developed a modular content framework that could support a wide range of formats, from quick hit social graphics and quote cards to serialized video franchises and editorial features. This system included motion templates, caption structures, thumbnail hierarchies, and layout conventions that made it easier for the team to produce high velocity content without sacrificing quality.
Each asset needed to function as both a piece of storytelling and a piece of brand reinforcement within the feed. In feed environments where users scroll quickly, visual consistency and immediate recognizability are essential. I treated each post as part of a larger mosaic, ensuring the overall grid and motion language reinforced the brand’s identity rather than feeling like a loose collection of experiments. That approach allowed B/R Kicks to maintain a strong presence even as the content mix expanded dramatically. Over time the system became a core creative operating model that supported everything from daily posts to large scale campaigns. Even small decisions about spacing, typography, and motion timing accumulated into a kind of visual jurisprudence that guided the team’s instincts. The result was a feed that carried a subtle but unmistakable aesthetic coherence even amid constant experimentation.
Audience development was another critical component of the work and required a deliberate strategic approach. Sneaker culture sits at the intersection of several communities including sports fans, streetwear enthusiasts, musicians, gamers, and designers. My goal was to build a platform that could speak to all of these audiences without losing its authenticity with core sneakerheads. I approached this by designing a layered content strategy that balanced insider knowledge with accessible storytelling.
Posts about rare releases, design lineage, or athlete exclusives would attract hardcore collectors, while humor, nostalgia, and cultural commentary helped bring in new audiences discovering sneaker culture through social media. This mix created a broad but cohesive community that felt invited into the conversation rather than excluded from it. It also allowed the brand to expand its reach organically as fans shared posts with friends who might not have otherwise followed a traditional sneaker outlet. The result was an audience that felt emotionally invested in the platform rather than passively consuming it. In many ways the work resembled cultural cartography, mapping how disparate interests could converge around a shared fascination with footwear.
Managing social media at scale required treating the feed itself as a living editorial product rather than a simple distribution channel. Every post needed to fit within a broader programming cadence that balanced breaking moments, evergreen storytelling, humor, nostalgia, and community engagement. I worked closely with our social programming team to build content calendars that anticipated key cultural moments such as major sneaker releases, NBA milestones, All Star Weekend, or brand collaborations. At the same time, we preserved flexibility so we could react quickly when unexpected moments captured the community’s attention. This balance between planning and responsiveness is what allowed B/R Kicks to feel both structured and alive. And when paired with a sharp authentic editorial copywriting voice, it was taken over the top.
The feed needed rhythm, variety, and a sense of personality that audiences could recognize instantly. By maintaining this editorial discipline, we were able to turn the account into a daily destination rather than an occasional source of updates. That consistency played a major role in building long term audience loyalty. The programming cadence eventually developed a kind of internal tempo, an almost metronomic pulse that guided when humor, history, hype, or nostalgia should enter the conversation. Sustaining that rhythm required a constant calibration of instinct and data so the brand could remain culturally fluent without becoming predictable. That deliberate inclusivity transformed casual viewers into participants who felt a sense of belonging within the brand’s ecosystem.
Content design was central to how the brand expressed itself visually and emotionally. I approached every graphic or animation not simply as decoration but as an opportunity to strengthen the storytelling. Typography, illustration styles, motion timing, and layout choices were all considered part of the narrative voice of the brand. For example, quote cards were designed to emphasize key moments of athlete expression while maintaining enough visual energy to stand out in crowded feeds. Motion graphics were used to bring sneaker histories or design evolutions to life in ways that static images could not accomplish. Even meme driven content was treated with a degree of craft so that humor never undermined the brand’s credibility. Beyond that, my rolodex of artists and collaborators from my work in Posterizes gave me such a unique advantage.
Over time this attention to design detail became a defining characteristic of B/R Kicks and helped differentiate it from many other sneaker accounts that relied purely on reposted imagery. It reinforced the idea that the platform was producing original cultural commentary rather than simply curating the internet. In certain cases the visual treatment bordered on the baroque, layering texture, animation, and typographic rhythm to elevate even simple concepts into memorable moments. That aesthetic ambition signaled to audiences that the brand valued craft as much as immediacy.
Copywriting and voice development were equally important in shaping the brand’s identity. Sneaker culture often oscillates between overly technical jargon and exaggerated hype language, neither of which fully reflects the nuance of the community. I worked to craft a tone that balanced enthusiasm, humor, and cultural awareness while still delivering useful context. Captions needed to feel conversational enough for social media but informed enough to maintain credibility with serious collectors. This meant referencing athlete stories, design inspirations, historical moments, and cultural touchpoints in ways that felt natural rather than forced.
Over time the voice of B/R Kicks became one of the brand’s most recognizable traits. Fans knew that the captions would provide insight, commentary, or humor that felt aligned with the community rather than detached from it. That tone became an important differentiator as the account grew in prominence. Language choices were treated almost like musical phrasing, where rhythm, emphasis, and cultural references could subtly shape how a message landed. The goal was to create captions that felt both literate and lively, a voice capable of speaking fluently to collectors, casual fans, and culture watchers alike.
Finally, a major part of the creative challenge involved navigating the broader social media wave that defined the era in which B/R Kicks emerged. The late 2010s saw a dramatic shift toward visual storytelling, short form video, meme culture, and creator driven distribution. I intentionally positioned the brand at the center of that shift by embracing platform native formats and encouraging experimentation with new styles of content. Animated edits, artist collaborations, interactive polls, short form video formats, and remix culture all became part of the brand’s creative vocabulary.
Rather than treating social media trends as fleeting gimmicks, I tried to interpret them through the lens of sneaker culture so they felt authentic to the audience. This approach allowed B/R Kicks to remain culturally literate while still maintaining a distinctive identity. It also reinforced the idea that the brand was participating in internet culture rather than simply observing it. That alignment with the evolving dynamics of social media helped the platform remain relevant as both the sneaker industry and the digital landscape continued to change. At times the environment felt almost protean, with new formats and behaviors emerging faster than traditional media instincts could track. Remaining agile within that volatility required curiosity, experimentation, and a willingness to treat the internet itself as a constantly evolving collaborator.
In early 2016, while working inside the Bleacher Report Media Lab, I began experimenting with the idea of launching a dedicated sneaker account on Instagram because it felt clear that this side of sports culture was being underrepresented in our coverage. Sneakers had already become a powerful storytelling layer around athletes, tunnel fashion, and identity, yet there was no focused vertical inside Bleacher Report that treated the subject with the same energy fans were bringing to it online. At the same time the company was going through a period of rapid expansion, relocating teams from San Francisco to New York as we scaled initiatives like Game of Zones and other original programming. I moved east as part of that transition and found myself in an environment where new creative ideas could quickly turn into real projects. Working closely with Joe Yanarella and Jermaine Spradley as we built out the Social Moments team, we were developing a rapid response playbook that allowed us to react to cultural moments in real time through design, illustration, and social storytelling. That mindset made the launch of the B/R Kicks Instagram account feel like a natural extension of what we were already experimenting with in the Lab. I started the page myself as an early test case to see whether sneaker culture could function as its own storytelling vertical within the broader Bleacher Report ecosystem. What began as a small internal experiment quickly showed signs that there was a large audience hungry for this kind of coverage.
Users from all around the globe and fans of different sports had a common interest in sneaker culture. Beyond that it opened up a whole new demographic who would come for the kicks and stay for the sports.This informed our decisions that there was a high amount of overlap amongst folks who wanted to see kicks not just on the court, field, and pitch, but also off of it. Subsequently we saw an opportunity to begin a new vertical where we could produce original content for an audience that was hungry for it without many other sources for this type of stuff on the market. This is what lead to the growth of one of the most important portfolio brands at Bleacher Report.
The initiative began as an editorial play where we wanted to bring value and storytelling to our core audience. One of the first projects we worked on as a part of launching BR Kicks, and the first social post on the freshly launched instagram account was a timeline on the "Rise of Adidas" which was a part of our Media Lab immersive articles project. In creating original content which featured unique storytelling, compelling artwork featuring paper crafted dioramas visualizing the key moments throughout the history of the brand, we were able to connect with the audience that we had built up in a new manner.
The story was one of our most read published editorials for that month and gave us the fuel needed to take this vertical more seriously. Similarly, another award winning Media Lab project, our tribute to Michael Jordan titled "MJ All Day" featured a sneaker evolution of his iconic Air Jordan line that I helped art direct and do background research for which saw immense success on youtube and acted as a pilot project for much of our future executions.
Realizing the power of original content in the sneaker space, I set out to take my learnings from the Media Lab initiative and my early work on our app and social media profiles to develop more projects for BR Kicks. Another story I had an opportunity to design and collaborate with my colleague C.J. Toledano a former Jimmy Fallon and Funny or Die writer on was a parallax article on the Nike "Air Mag" which similarly to the Adidas piece saw renewed interest in the Kicks topic and bolstered our confidence in further exploring avenues for growth and audience development.
Using the editorial CMS I had built out as a member of the Media Lab I was able to pair a quick turnaround editorial piece with original photography I had taken at a Nike Brand activation for the re-release of the auto-lacing version of the shoe and original video and illustration assets. I built out an interactive web experience by rendering out new assets and set a precedent for high end sneaker storytelling. This formula was followed many times in the future for things like our photography based Air Max Day celebration piece or our exclusive editorial scoop around Carmelo Anthony bringing back the Jordan Melo 1.5's or even our more in depth features on John Geiger or Dr. J.
In the early days, the accounts were driven primarily by photography and sharp curation, long before we had budgets for illustration commissions, motion packages, or original video shoots. We relied on a disciplined editorial eye to surface the most compelling tunnel fits, on court exclusives, and street level style, sequencing posts in a way that told a cohesive visual story rather than a stream of isolated images. This constraint forced us to define the brand’s taste profile early, establishing credibility through selection and context instead of production value. As engagement grew, that foundation justified investment in custom illustration, animation, and eventually full scale video production, allowing us to evolve from curators of culture to active co creators within it. The transition was intentional. Each new layer of craft was introduced to deepen storytelling while preserving the authenticity that made the audience trust us in the first place. By the time we expanded into original shoots and motion systems, the community already recognized the voice, ensuring that higher production value amplified the signal rather than diluting it.
The rapid growth of B/R Kicks across social platforms created a powerful inbound gravity that began reshaping how talent, brands, and cultural figures interacted with Bleacher Report as a whole. As the account’s influence expanded, the office itself increasingly functioned as a physical node in a much larger cultural network, with athletes, musicians, designers, and creators stopping through during press runs, sneaker launches, or media appearances. What started as organic visits gradually evolved into a recognizable opportunity space for content production, because every guest arriving in the building represented a potential storytelling moment waiting to be activated. I began to think about these visits less as isolated interviews and more as programmable assets within a larger content ecosystem.
By mapping the rhythms of talent availability and aligning them with editorial priorities, we were able to convert brief windows of access into repeatable creative opportunities. This approach reframed the office as a kind of agile production studio embedded inside the daily operations of the company. The strategy allowed us to extract maximum value from limited time with high profile guests while keeping production costs extremely lean. In effect, B/R Kicks helped transform casual drop ins into a scalable content pipeline that connected celebrity access with a fast moving social distribution engine. That shift represented a subtle but important evolution in how we thought about both talent relationships and content production.
To operationalize this opportunity, I helped develop a flexible in studio video circuit that functioned as a menu of modular show formats designed specifically for quick turnaround production. The concept was simple but strategically powerful: instead of designing a new format for every guest, we built a portfolio of repeatable segments that could be executed rapidly using existing sets, lighting setups, and production crews. This framework allowed us to move from concept to capture within minutes of a guest arriving, dramatically increasing the efficiency of our talent pipeline. Shows could be produced with minimal setup, edited quickly for social distribution, and slotted directly into our programming cadence. The circuit effectively became a creative operating system for the studio, ensuring that no moment of talent access went unused. It also allowed the brand to maintain a steady flow of personality driven content that complemented our editorial and social storytelling. Over time these formats became recognizable franchises that audiences anticipated whenever a new guest appeared. The system turned spontaneous visits into structured programming opportunities while maintaining the relaxed authenticity that made the interactions feel natural on camera. In many ways it exemplified the broader philosophy behind B/R Kicks, which was to build systems that could translate cultural proximity into scalable media output.
These experiences that leveraged our talent team brought with it an important question - how could we continue to squeeze value out of unique small opportunities we could get with actors, rappers, athletes, and influencers that we could turn around into content? One solution that I came up with in our writers room was to leverage short visits to the office by these people with a menu of quick turnaround and low lift content executions that were easily repeatable and scalable. These 1-2 minute short form vehicles were intended to be primarily for social media as bite sized sneaker stories that we shot in studio while an athlete would visit our New York Headquarters. Calling it the BR Circuit, we were able to put the kicks content as a core part of this new content strategy.
One such example of a series that came out of these conversations was "Road Rotation" that asked these folks what the handful of shoes that would travel with on a regular basis would be. As the people we were interviewing were often already traveling for press tours, we were able to ask them relevant questions about why they picked those specific shoes to travel with. Episodes included conversations with Earthgang, Waka Flocka, Diana Taurasi, and Arike Ogunbowale as well.
In a similar vein, another show that I helped ideate around as a part of this talent driven quick turn content initiative was a series called "My First Pair" which is as simple as the title makes it sound. The beauty of a series like this was it's simplicity and it's universal appeal since pretty much any person coming into the office would have a story about the first meaningful shoe they purchased or received. We have had opportunities to shoot episodes with the likes of Taylor Bennett, Bol Bol, Nate Robinson, Bas, Tacko Fall, RJ Hampton, Qias Omar, Megan Rapinoe, and Aaron Gordon. The hope is to continue this series and explore more of these stories as we evolve the brand.
These talent driven directives became a through line in my later work as a producer on the B/R Entertainment team, where I was tasked with ideating formats for BR Circuit and developing repeatable offerings for talent coming into the office for shoots. At B/R Kicks, the My First Pair series embodied this philosophy by centering on a universal entry point. No matter who you are, athlete, rapper, celebrity, or influencer, everyone has a first sneaker that marks the beginning of their relationship with the culture. That shared origin story made the format instantly accessible, emotionally resonant, and highly adaptable across talent tiers and audience segments. Its simplicity was its strength, allowing us to capture authentic storytelling while creating a scalable franchise that delivered both cultural value and strong performance.
Another aspect of coverage we would do on a yearly basis that was access driven was our NFL focused "Cleat Week" series I would collaborate on with Ryan O'leary and our studio production and video team as we leveraged access with big name NFL players to customize their cleats with some of the biggest sneaker customizers in the game, and filmed the whole process during the week that the NFL encourages players to wear custom cleats dedicated to charities or special causes. One of my favorite integrations is where we actually were able to pair Antonio Brown as NFL talent with our BR Kicks cleat week package and then included a special animated segment with our friends at Flicker Labs to make a custom Gridiron Heights reveal segment -
An important phase in the growth of B/R Kicks as a sub brand within the broader Turner Sports ecosystem was proving that pilot content could be monetized in a repeatable, scalable way. For the vertical to graduate from a passion driven side project into a core component of the company’s content engine, we needed to demonstrate that our storytelling could translate into sustainable revenue streams. This meant designing formats with built in sponsorship surfaces, aligning release calendars with brand moments, and packaging cultural relevance into proposals that media buyers could clearly value. Monetization was not treated as an afterthought but as a validation layer that signaled the brand’s long term viability and justified deeper investment in talent, production, and distribution. As revenue began to materialize, it unlocked departmental growth and enabled more ambitious executions, from higher production video to experiential activations. That financial proof point legitimized the thesis that culture led storytelling could drive both engagement and business outcomes.
Commercialization was another area where the brand matured from promising experiment to meaningful business. To support this shift, I worked closely with sales and branded content teams, participating in strategy sessions and helping translate creative concepts into market ready narratives for RFPs tied to the year’s biggest product releases. I helped frame our audience insights, content formats, and distribution strengths in language that resonated with brand partners while protecting the authenticity that made the platform credible. Working closely with Turner's sales and partnership teams we found ways to expand the brand and make it more tandgible.
These collaborations required balancing editorial integrity with sponsor objectives, ensuring integrations felt additive rather than intrusive. By joining client meetings and go to market discussions, I was able to advocate for ideas that preserved cultural fluency while meeting commercial goals. This cross functional alignment strengthened internal trust in the vertical and positioned B/R Kicks as a reliable partner for high value campaigns. Over time, these efforts helped establish a blueprint for how emerging sub brands within the Turner portfolio could move from experimental pilots to revenue generating pillars.
As the audience expanded and the content engine became more sophisticated, I worked closely with internal stakeholders to help translate cultural fluency into sponsor ready opportunities that still felt authentic to the community. That required positioning the brand not only as a publisher but as a creative partner capable of developing original concepts, packaging audience insights, and delivering across both endemic and non endemic categories. I established an editorial voice and modular design system that could travel seamlessly across platforms, with templates and visual sensibilities flexible enough to support vertical video, longform storytelling, quick hit social graphics, interactive stories, and more raw, creator led formats optimized for platforms like TikTok without losing the core identity of the brand.
We were able to demonstrate that sneaker storytelling could support branded entertainment, sponsored franchises, custom creative, platform integrations, and broader go to market narratives without flattening the identity of the brand. This was critical because revenue only becomes durable when commercial thinking is built into the structure of the platform rather than layered on after the fact. My contribution was helping ensure that the work remained culturally credible while still becoming legible to partners, sales teams, and decision makers who needed a clearer articulation of its business value. Over time, that alignment helped turn B/R Kicks into a monetization engine with real portfolio significance. It also proved that subcultural authority, when paired with strong creative operations, can drive both audience growth and commercial viability.
One of the first large scale brand activations we landed was a sponsored opportunity around New Balance LAZR sneakers. I suggested we do an "extreme" unboxing using high intensity laser pointers that would literally cut through the box and with the help of our talent coordination team we paired up with Paul Rabil we were able to make this crazy idea a reality. Down the line this would lead to an even more insane sneaker unboxing we did while skydiving. These types of high production value experiments would lead to a number of monetization opportunities from a branded, sponsor, and partnership perspective.
This partnership with our brand marketing and sponsored content team lead to executions such as our animated "Fila Time Warp" video featuring Grant Hill telling a story about his old NBA kicks, as well as multiple sneaker related Playmaker brand executions with Google and Patrick Mahomes where his best friend created a pair of custom Adidas waverunners for him and his wife showed off his completed sneaker closet to him in another. BR Kicks was a natural avenue for us to integrate sponsors into existing IP like the Jayson Tatum Ruffles video below:
Sneakers became a staple of our content offering such as our live product unveiling of Nike's All Star collection for Footlocker, or our Webby Award nominated activation with Adidas and House of Highlights for the James Harden Adidas sneakers, and even a selected series of "Sneaker Showdowns" for Dicks Sporting Goods. These types of branded executions were impressive as they weren't just in the kicks realm but also partnerships that allowed us to create content around sneakers for a non endemic brand such as Google, and then distribute that content both on our national platforms but also to more niche communities such as our Kicks stream and BR Kicks social accounts.
Seeing BR Kicks success with a targeted audience that was heavily engaged, even for sponsored content, we were able to leverage our position in the industry with an in house creative team as well as multiple distribution channels to drive unique revenue generation opportunities for our brand. One such example was the "Discover Your Air" campaign that I played a role of art director and creative strategist on in the development stages once again working with Evan Silver and Rich Lopez from our playmaker team. For this commercial featuring PJ Tucker, Pia Mia, and JD McCrary we were approached by Footlocker to act essentially as a white glove agency in producing a commercial for the launch of their new Air Max seasonal campaign.
We handled everything from the ideation to the script writing, to the production and talent outreach and even post production and sfx. Instead of going with a traditional advertising agency, they chose to come to use due to our unique ability to both create and distribute the content. This is a value proposition that we always strove to highlight, and keeping our audience engaged with fresh content that could be sponsored but would still be informative or entertaining was most important goal whenever we went into any new project.
Another video series that I helped creative direct, produce, shoot, edit and develop was our 72 Hours concept that was kicked off with our initial experiment on ground at All Star Los Angeles in 2018. I came up with this concept as a way to tie together disparate content experiences on the ground at events like All Star. This way, we would be able to cover a full weekend of events and turn it into a series that could be repeated at future experiential executions. The evolution of this concept led to my putting together a video with Jaylen Brown with the Boston Celtics attending Paris Fashion week while attending some of the biggest shows from Rick Owens to Valentino.
At its core these type of videos were an effort to humanize the "sneaker world" that many insiders get to experience during these exclusive launches. These types of videos were a sneak peek behind the curtain for our core audience and provided a perfect middle ground between talent access and our core demographic voice. It allowed BR Kicks to create content that was specifically built for its target demographic by leveraging unique talent access. When we got access with a guy like Dame we would make sure they felt comfortable and just let the content flow from there and I think you can see that in the final result.
As we carved out more of a lane for fashion coverage and BR Kicks became known in the space for having a distinct voice outside of just athletes and had a foot firmly planted in the style media industry outside of it's influence in the sports space, we were able to expand to do series such as the simple yet compelling "What are you Wearing" featuring appearances from rappers like DaBaby, Smokepurpp, Serge Ibaka and Roddy Ricch. The show breaks down the style and fashion choices of the talent featured on screen from head to toe starting with things like hats, glasses, jewelry and accessories all the way down to the sneakers on their feet. The fact that we were able to produce a series like this while expanding our purview as a brand in terms of what we cover in a way that felt natural to our audience was a big achievement. It lead to a partnership with brands such as GAP to produce a "Drip Director"series featuring Iman Shumpert
I similarly had a chance to shape another one of our talent based Sneaker Series which had more of a technical and artistic influence in our "Behind the Design" series that dove deeper into the storytelling behind an athlete and their connection to their shoes. I helped come up with the idea on a shoot with Eric Avar who designed much of the Nike Kobe line. The Kicks team was on location learning about the new Converse basketball shoe and while we were capturing footage with Eric, I pitched the idea of a series that took these insightful interviews with designers and athletes as its own content vehicle. By combining these two perspectives we could offer a holistic overview of the production process and design vision behind the sneaker.
We did episodes with players such as Bucks Superstar and NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo around the release of his first signature sneaker on location in Greece and how his origin story inspired colorways of his first shoe. These in depth sneaker profiles also spoke with members of the sneaker design team who worked on the backend development process of these shoes. This idea married the technical and design aspects of the shoe with the brand storytelling and marketing of the product. Future episodes included a look at the Olympic Logo Design with Bobby Hundreds, an inside look at Adidas Parley renewable technology with Chad Ochocinco, and and exclusive breakdown of the Air Jordan 34 with Blake Griffin at Nike headquarters.
However - knowing that leveraging talent wouldn't always be an option that was feasible from a time perspective and from an efficiency perspective, me and the team knew that we would need video franchises that could stand on their own and be done on a repeatable basis without any external factors like access or getting our hands on a shoe to unbox. Along with producer Shakir Standley and talent Lance Fresh I helped develop and refine a "Kicks on the Street" show concept that would interact with everyday people as a way to see genuine reactions around new releases and test people's trivia knowledge around the kicks world in almost in a cash cab style quick question challenge for free pairs. This gave us something in our show portfolio that contrasted from our more premium access based concepts and could be used to fill the content calendar during times that there were no new shoes coming out.
Another aspect of BR Kicks original content that I was tasked with developing was taking the learning that I had developed as a content strategist and producer as well as an art director in launching our Social Moments team and applying those to the Kicks vertical. This meant coming up with social strategy around content that we could produce quickly in response to conversations happening within the space, such as the photoshops of athletes wearing Supreme sleeves I worked on to engage our audience in a real time manner. It was really taking and translating the playbook and giving it an authentic voice while personalizing and giving the unique style and attitude that really only theKicks vertical had to all content.
Finding visuals that would key in on relatable cultural touchstones that our audience would resonate with and engage with was the main guiding light as far as content strategy was concerned. This intersection between sports and culture allowed for a great amount of room to conceptualize new ways to excite our fans. While video franchises and our integration into our app were important, our social media channels were our primary touchpoint for our audience. Having original content and a unique voice was a lofty goal that ultimately paid off with millions of fans across multiple social platforms in the manner of a few short months.
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Spearheading a social playbook with my creative direction and vision, I worked to develop a regular rotation of talented artists across the world, tapping into similar experiences from my time launching Posterizes, so that we would have a varied rolodex of illustrators, animators, designers, and even performers to help us create content in a nimble manner. These projects were some of our highest performing pieces of content whether they were released for holidays like Father's Day, Birthdays, Thanksgiving, or Black Friday or around individual Sneaker drops or releases and tentpole events such as Air Max Day the Draft Lottery or NBA playoffs and even Movie and Album releases. Working as the creative director on many of these projects, my role was to ideate with the team around these key moments and work on concepts that were cohesive and engaging that could be turned around in collaboration with illustrators or animators to produce content optimized to post at the perfectly timed moment.
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The process to produce this type of social first content would involve coming up with creative concepts and pairing that with a creator who could bring that idea to life with solid art direction and feedback. Personally one of my major directives was finding a diverse range of creators and mediums from everything from watercolors, rotoscoping, and even comic book artists. Just like my art direction philosophy that I implemented for our social team, the selection and curation of art styles and new perspectives was key to telling new and compelling stories that would engage with people in away different than other publishers. In my eye, this art direction was meant to elevate the work with new styles that other people weren't willing to try and explore.
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The majority of the time I would also provide graphic design support from a typography or formatting standpoint or take assets delivered from artists and elevate it for our platforms by adding motion or integrating it together into larger executions. The experience I had from launching an artist collective like Posterizes translated extremely well in this context as I was able to leverage my own existing relationships and network to parlay new collaborations for BR Kicks.
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These illustrations and pieces of original content were often tied to big moments on our content calendars and helped amplify sneaker and sports storylines relevant on social. This lead to a number of content buckets that were filled using these art directed pieces of content. One example is our "Roster Illustrations" like Team 3 Stripes or Jordan Squad which featured a cast of athletes who are signed to a specific brand lined up wearing different outfits and sneakers.
Similarly, much of the success of these pieces of content was finding the intersection between sports culture, sneaker culture, and pop culture which included instances such as our TV show inspired Kyrie pack, or our "What If" Kyrie Cereal pack illustrations. One of our most successful projects was one featuring Kobe Bryant sitting at the head of a table in a "Last Supper" inspired multi slide illustration featuring his different sneaker disciples. This piece had such high engagement that we actually had the head of Body Armour request a framed version of it to be hung up in their headquarters.
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Similar to the Kobe Last Supper Project, we have had athletes reach out to get framed prints of our original artwork and commissions for their homes or other places as well. One notable instance of this was in our extremely unique execution that was originally explored as a part of our Art of Kobe project that I had the pleasure to art direct and contribute to while a part of our Media Lab department. In collaboration with a Greek artist, Charis Tsevis, we created portraits of Kobe Bryant and PJ Tucker out of sneakers.
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This time consuming process required an insane amount of research on my end, as I essentially had to build a full color palette out of sneakers before selecting the right images to create the sneaker portraits out of. Both images are some of our highest performing pieces of original content, and PJ even requested a framed copy to hang up in his new Sneaker store opening in Houston, Texas. These types of projects are indicative of the time and effort it often took to create compelling original content for BR Kicks.
Outside of standard sneaker unboxings, one of the things I really wanted to focus on was quickly consumable social video content in the Kicks space that we could program cross platform. These type of videos would be inherently meant for social consumption and usually be 60 seconds long or shorter. As far as the overall sneaker content space and industry, this was a major white space that I felt BR Kicks could really own. Many of the other accounts in the space were focused on two main types of content, actual unboxing and first looks, and curated sneaker imagery from the pitch or on court and I wanted our video content to set us apart.
In its early years the Kicks brand was known for great curation of news and on court content, with a focus on photography and illustrations. Expanding into video content was a key part of growing the brand and finding ways to really monetize the entire experience that we had built. Prior to building out our video presence, BR Kicks was largely known for its static content offerings like the photoshops or quote cards we were doing along with our tentpole original illustrated content and on court photography.
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This included taking our social moments playbook like I mentioned earlier and working with the actual creators on our social moments design team like our video editors PJ Selzer or Jerry Wang to integrate sneakers into animated shows like Spongebob or movies like Space Jam or even Television show clips like Friends. Finding opportunities to bring pop culture into the equation, whether that was creating motion graphics like this Stranger Things crossover or our Pokemon "Name that Sneaker" IG story game or was a big part of it as well along with sneaker hype tapes. It was this continually collaborative process that mixed great talented creative folks with people who were good at writing and telling stories with an eye for narrative and let them create content.
You can imagine the way that we could stop your average sneaker content consumer who is used to polished and high end PR releases from brands and commercials or the standard lower quality user generated photography you see from sneakerheads, and you contrast that with the amazingly vibrant animated headswap motion tracked cartoon edits that we would create with PJ Selzer from our moments team. BR Kicks was really able to stand out from the crowd in this way and make itself feel like no other sneaker brand out there. This type of content was all about really standing alone as the people who could pull off this type of content.
However there were also other concepts that our audience really enjoyed including ways to creatively present sneaker releases, or to give our fans a peak into Antonio Brown or Kelly Oubre or even Kendall Jenner's closets. This type of accessible content led to partnerships such as "What's in my Bag" featuring Russell Westbrook. These content experiments really made our slate of offerings broader and more accessible to a wider audience.
Perhaps more important was the effect that this type of content had on the overall voice of the brand. Sneaker culture is often viewed as traditionally more of an insider thing where knowledge of brands and color ways and makes and models are what gives you credibility. However, one of the main goals of BR Kicks and the content that I both created and produced for the brand was to lean into more of an irreverent voice that was far more relatable in so many ways. This made the actual base of fans that were able to engage and interact with the content much wider, and with a larger pool to pull from more fans were able to feel like they were a part of the conversation.
In an industry that is often defined by exclusivity, the voice was catering towards universal experiences and embracing the idea of not always being the cool kid, but sometimes just being the folks who can laugh at a joke or share in the pain of losing out to some bots or hype beasts on a sneaker release. Balancing this more comedic angle of the brand with the intrinsic informational aspect that older sneaker heads crave was a difficult thing to balance, but also ultimately what allowed for BR Kicks to thrive in the long run.
Animation was another aspect that I was deeply involved in during my time at Bleacher Report whether it was my experience behind Game of Zones or consulting on projects such as Gridiron Heights, and bringing BR Kicks into the fold to produce content like that was important to me. I felt that there were many ways you could show the intricacies of sneaker design through a medium like animation. Having seen success with concepts such as our Michael Jordan Sneaker History video, I was emboldened to try a project called "Love Child" which took a creative eye towards an idea often considered blasphemous in sneaker circles - exploring the idea of what it would look like to fuse two iconic sneaker silhouettes as a singular combined shoe.
Although the video didn't perform as well as previous animated experiments it did illicit a heavy amount of fan engagement and feedback, and therefore was a piece of content we truly saw value in. One of my strict beliefs while leading the BR Kicks team was that you have to look deeper than your basic engagement numbers to truly understand the impact of a piece of content. This "Lovechild" project was something that sparked debate, and that was integral to developing a community around sneakers and not just chasing fads or following fickle social media trends. In the end it all comes down to authenticity.
Some of our most impactful content was based around sneaker histories. Some of the ones I had the pleasure to work on included the Evolution of the Ultraboost, A History of Flight, Mamba Moments, and my personal favorite Kobe's Nike Sneaker history where I got to play the role of creative director, sound designer, motion graphics designer, and producer. These projects required a heavy amount of research and planning along with high level execution and our audience noticed as much. In terms of watch time and viewer retention, these videos ranked atop all of our content, often getting multiple rewatches and being evergreen enough to repost again on anniversaries or other key dates, to this day they stand as some of BR Kicks best work.
This type of content was integral in creating a content calendar that produced key moments throughout the week between all the different offerings that we had available. Kicks on court was something we could always count on during the season, and the quote cards would come from time to time, original animations and memes and the more comedic content would be dictated by bigger releases and this allowed us to fill some of the remaining white space on the calendars.
One of the biggest days on the NBA calendar and on the Sneaker calendar is Christmas day, and it would go on to become one of BR Kicks highest engaged moments of the year. As such, one of the main directives was the create a dearth of highly engaging content experiments for our audience to interact with while they sat at home watching NBA action all day long. In different years we did different executions such as a sneaker unboxing of iconic animated show moments, or a more social news style video going through iconic kicks on court worn on Christmas day. We even ran back our sneaker mashups formula with a holiday color way twist.
However, one of the main videos I was able to produce and art direct was a historical look back at the Kobe 6 Grinch, perhaps the most iconic sneaker to drop on Christmas day. From writing the script to working on the motion graphics with Kasper Nyman to coordinating the music and voice over and doing the sound design, the project was completed just prior to Christmas morning and was one of our highest engaged and most "saved" instagram posts of all time. Things like this were what made creating content for the Kicks team fun as it let me combine my instinct for sports content around a big social trigger with nostalgic influences from a childhood cartoon.
One of the initiatives that was developed to integrate BR Kicks into Turner's live sports coverage was the concept of the BR Kicks cam. These segments featured shoes that players were wearing to games and on court as a way to highlight unique stories around sneaker culture. It was a distinct example of incorporating the BR Kicks brand and voice into the larger Turner Sports ecosystem, as it gives the digital brand an extension to a broader NBA audience while simultaneously giving the TNT broadcast credibility in the sneaker culture space through it's association with BR Kicks.
Much like our social media accounts and Game of Zones promotions on linear these promotions saw an increase of thousands of new eyeballs to our social accounts. My role in these was around coming up with overall aesthetics and art direction around these features before it was handed off to our design team and Turner for execution.
The BR Kicks brand voice evolved over time to fall in a unique space that cradled the worlds of lifestyle, sports, and pop culture while appealing to a broad range of people. Differentiating the brand voice while being able to appeal to our target demographic was key. From a social engagement perspective, this positioning allows for flexibility, taking the clothes and sneakers that surround the game on the floor and in the tunnel, and the players that play the game and pairing it with the culture of the stars and rappers that they hang out with after the game. Balancing this juxtaposition of the field or court and the red carpet was a key aspect of growing the brand. From a programming standpoint running the social accounts, while posting this was a key aspect in every single decision to publish content.
Brand positioning was of tantamount importance to me as I helped lead our team in defining the ethos behind BR Kicks because the opportunity to provide a unique viewpoint in the space could really set BR Kicks apart. In late 2018 we embarked on a journey to rebrand BR Kicks and make it more of a standalone brand. After doing a needs analysis and a gap assessment on the current market, I helped lead brainstorms with the best and brightest sneakerheads at the company.
After numerous rounds of back and forth we settled on a bright and energetic color palette with a simplified and visually bold logo that took the focus off of the "B/R" aspect and leaned into sneaker culture and kicks. Akin to the moment when Facebook dropped the "the" one of the primary aspects of refreshing the brand was leaning on the "Kicks" moniker as more of a standalone brand. The refresh included things such as an emoji sticker pack that would add a brash and invigorating burst of personality to our content and could become a touchpoint for consumers to use on Instagram or Snapchat stories.
Working with the talented David Garcia and Dylan Lathrop on our content design team we developed a new visual system with playful elements such as a set of interactive emoji characters and a set of unique halftone pattern inspired textures. This refresh was a great way to breathe new life into the brand and set it apart in a crowded space. As a part of the BR Kicks braintrust, I was a part of the creative iteration process in getting the design work across the line by providing feedback as we made revisions to help fit our brand even better. We were the core transformative creative force in evolving the brand over toa new era.
With a strong new defined set of brand guidelines we were able to come across more professionally and cohesively across all platforms. This packaging and branding exercise took place over the course of many months as I provided creative feedback along with the rest of our core kicks team as we collaborated with our content designers. Whether it was forming a robust set of templates for sneaker news and updates or finding ways to give away sneakers in a creative manner on our social platforms, this refresh allowed us to take a step back and think about the Kicks brand holistically.
Another prime example of integrating BR Kicks into the broader Turner's Sports ecosystem was the NBA Awards where our team was responsible for the "Sneaker King Award" at the 2019 Award show in Los Angeles. For a project as unique as this I had the opportunity to design and art direct the actual trophy that we presented to PJ Tucker at the award show. Collaborating with a ceramic artist based out of LA named Brock DeBoer. The process involved art directing and concepting what the award would look like and then creating molds of the sneakers. We went with the Air Jordan 1 silhouette as it is one of the most iconic ones in kicks history but was also actually the first shoe that PJ received as a kid. The sculpture was then dipped in gold and placed on a reflective base before being presented to PJ at the Red Carpet in Los Angeles.
One other aspect that I spearheaded for our NBA Awards show was the animated promotional video featuring mixed media of PJ on the court, images of him arriving kicks in hand, and an illustrated breakdown of the most iconic sneakers he wore that season. This type of content was a staple of BR Kicks as well and an evolution of the sneaker history projects done earlier. It brought together many of the successful elements of other recipes. This type of content was a natural next iteration from the initial sneaker evolution videos that I had a chance to spearhead.
The concept of the Sneaker King award was an interesting moment as it led to a deeper appetite internally for more Kicks content where there was no script and we could create moments around more organic conversations around sneaker culture as a way to humanize the members of the community. This allowed us to reinforce that ethos of everyone being a sneaker head by bringing athletes and icons in the speaker space down to the level of the consumer and allow them to be imminently accessible. Our unique relationship with PJ Tucker actually led to another exclusive opportunity for BR Kicks andour audience as we explored a new franchise called "Pick My Kicks" which leveraged our access to athletes and our massive social following to give fans a chance to help players "pick" what shoe to wear during nationally televised games on TNT (Shoutout to that Turner connection) through Instagram Story polls on the BR Kicks profile on game days.
We did a series of games with PJ Tucker and Lance Stephenson where fans decided what kicks they would wear via our polls and then we would cover them during the broadcast using our BRKicks cam as a way to promote synergy across the brands. The endeavor proved that the kicks platform could be a part of a larger Turner Sports initiative that streamlined operations vertically across different siter organizations in a synergistic way that enhanced coverage and resulted in more overall eyeballs and deeper fan connection. Being able to vote for the shoes on our IG story and then to see the direct result on the players feet in game on the broadcast was a very unique benefit for us.
Leveraging features such as Instagram Live we were able to showcase different closets, sneaker color ways, and have conversations with athletes like Kevin Durant or designers like Sean Wotherspoon where the six degrees of separation between the influencer and the audience was minimal. Like I have said before in terms of my philosophy on the team stream app or our social moments team, the more barriers you can remove between the content and the audience the better.
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The next year, to celebrate two of the most style defining athletes in the league, we developed a pair of custom B/R Kicks trophies honoring P.J. Tucker as back-to-back Sneaker King and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as the Fit King of the league. The idea was to create something that felt closer to a collectible design object than a traditional sports award. Instead of relying on conventional trophy materials and forms, we built sculptural display pieces that framed the award like a gallery artifact. Each trophy was constructed as a mirrored display column with a clear acrylic front that allowed the central symbol to appear suspended within the case. Reflective internal panels created depth and amplified light from every angle, giving the object a strong visual presence both in person and on camera. The exterior was wrapped in B/R Kicks blue with oversized typography running vertically across the structure. Player names were printed across the top surface so each piece felt personalized and specific to the athlete being recognized.
Inside each display we designed symbolic objects that represented the identity of the award itself. For P.J. Tucker’s Sneaker King trophies the centerpiece was a series of polished metallic crown sculptures that referenced his reputation as one of the most respected sneaker collectors in the league. For Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s Fit King recognition the interior element became a mirrored fashion box that reflected his reputation for pushing style in NBA tunnel culture. These elements were cast using resin and finished with a reflective metallic coating so they carried a sense of weight and permanence. The mirrored interior surfaces multiplied the forms inside the chamber and created a layered visual effect that made the objects feel larger and more dimensional. Every angle produced a slightly different reflection which made the pieces feel dynamic even when stationary. The result was an award that celebrated sneaker culture visually rather than relying solely on text or engraving.
To complete the experience the trophies were delivered inside custom wooden crates branded with oversized B/R Kicks typography. The packaging was intentionally inspired by the ritual of opening a new sneaker box. Removing the crate lid revealed the mirrored display case inside, turning the presentation into a moment that felt similar to an unboxing. That experience became part of the storytelling around the award and gave us a strong visual narrative for social and editorial content. Alongside the physical objects we created illustrated artworks celebrating each athlete’s style journey which extended the storytelling across digital platforms. The trophies therefore functioned both as a real world artifact and as a content catalyst for the brand. This approach allowed the recognition to live beyond a single moment and circulate through the broader B/R Kicks ecosystem. It transformed the awards into something fans could engage with visually and culturally.
The broader vision behind the project was to treat style recognition with the same creative seriousness that sneaker culture itself carries. I led the concept development around how the award could embody the visual language of B/R Kicks while still feeling unique to the athletes receiving it. That meant thinking carefully about proportions, typography, materials, reflections, and how the object would appear in photography and video. The goal was to create something that could sit naturally in a sneaker collector’s space or studio rather than feeling like a conventional sports trophy. By approaching the design as a collectible object instead of a standard award we were able to celebrate player style in a way that felt culturally aligned with the community we were speaking to. The trophies became both a recognition of individual expression and an extension of the B/R Kicks design identity. For me it was a chance to translate the visual language of the brand into a tangible object.
Outside of unboxing sneakers, one of the major things that BR Kicks was lacking was talent centric video series that actually looked into the sneaker industry and spoke with the creators who were making their mark in the Kicks space. One of the major directives as BR Kicks grew to more than just a social presence the team and I wanted to develop more formalized episodic series that could focus on individuals within the community. The initial experiment which kicked this type of content off was our Preheat series which I helped produce with the rest of our Kicks team and focused on the come up of artist Joshua Vides who we had apply his signature style to a pair of Off White Jordan 1's. These type of intimate profiles allowed us to distill the backgrounds of these sneaker influencers into bite size pieces of content that could be consumed in an informative manner and thereby making our audience smarter sneaker customers. The show would go on to be a staple in our decks we would take out to market to work with sneaker brands and was exemplary in showing what BR Kicks really stood for.
One of the important aspects that allowed the Bleacher Report Kicks brand to flourish under my guidance was a strong partnership with our talent team and our BR entertainment team that helped to produce our original serialized concepts. By dipping our toe in original programming, I had a chance to test out my skills as a creative executive and producer who helped coordinate the overall look and feel of different sneaker show franchises while also helping on the production side in terms of camera angles, shot blocking, set design, and sound and even appearing on a couple episodes as a host. These type of content experiments really helped me develop a taste for how to create successful web series and how to best work within the schedules and needs of our talent department.
Working with our BR Entertainment team under the BR Kicks banner was first truly brought into the fold through a summer league opportunity with Lakers young stars Josh Hart and Kyle Kuzma where we had two members of our front facing talent, Adam Lefkoe and Shakir Standley prank people inside of a Las Vegas sneaker store a la Impractical Jokers. I got to act as a creative consultant on this project and helped ideate the concept and come up with bits for them to do, however what was more important was experience and partnership with a team that would give us the tools to expand the ways in which we could connect with our audience.
Another show I helped develop and conceptualize for the BR Kicks team was Sneaker Shock, which was a Shorty Award nominated series where we surprised unsuspecting fans with sneakers and gave them away. The show included branded content opportunities with the likes of Under Armour in San Francisco, Showtime in Chicago, and Brand Jordan in Paris. This type of show was indicative of the entire brand voice of BR Kicks which looked to make sneaker culture accessible to everyday kids and allowed everyone to be a part of the conversation. It was a series that allowed us to give back to the community in a unique manner by making exclusive shoes available to underserved communities and unsuspecting fans or strangers.
By making random fans who were simply buying some ice cream, practicing with their team, taking a stroll down the park, or buying some new shoes for their kids and surprising them with the top shelf kicks that are normally reserved for the who's who of the industry really flipped the conversation. Working with our BR Entertainment team who dealt with our larger serialized show productions we developed a production schedule and show pilot with me taking the duties of leading the art direction for the show (For instance in our first episode we converted an entire Mister Softee Ice cream truck into a sneaker inspired frozen treat experience - So I had a chance to redesign an entire menu with custom illustrations and logo work.) After launching that initial pilot episode we saw heavy interest from brands who would let us leverage their athletes to add a new layer to the show. As we evolved to do more partnerships with players like Derrick Rose, Jayson Tatum, Jabari Parker, and Steph Curry.
One of the other ways that I helped develop a strategy for B/R Kicks was through a deliberate social and product integration that connected our content engine to Bleacher Report’s broader web and app ecosystem. Rather than allowing the brand to exist solely as a social media account, we built a multi channel framework that distributed sneaker culture across every major consumer touchpoint available to us. This meant integrating aggregated news, on court imagery, original video, illustrations, and branded storytelling into a cohesive pipeline that could live simultaneously across social feeds, the Bleacher Report website, and the Team Stream app environment. Each platform served a distinct function within the larger system. Social channels acted as the ignition layer where moments of culture surfaced quickly and sparked conversation, while the website offered deeper editorial storytelling and evergreen content experiences. The app environment then became the utility layer, where fans could subscribe to sneaker updates, follow releases, and receive real time alerts around key moments in the industry. By coordinating how content moved between these surfaces, we were able to transform isolated posts into a continuous narrative that traveled across the entire Bleacher Report ecosystem. This approach ensured that sneaker coverage was not just visible but structurally embedded within the company’s core product experience.
Designing this distribution architecture made the brand significantly more durable and scalable over time. Instead of relying on algorithm driven reach from a single platform, B/R Kicks became a cross platform property capable of reaching audiences through multiple entry points depending on how they consumed sports media. A sneaker drop or cultural moment might begin as a fast moving social post, expand into a deeper editorial feature on the website, trigger push notifications within the app, and then generate follow up discussion through comment threads and community engagement. That interconnected flow allowed the brand to behave less like a single channel and more like a living media network embedded within the broader Bleacher Report infrastructure. It also strengthened the company’s overall product ecosystem by demonstrating how a culture driven vertical could deepen user engagement across web, app, and social simultaneously. From a strategic perspective, this integration helped validate the idea that strong editorial identity paired with thoughtful product distribution can create a much more resilient media property.
Using our app and notification system as a pipeline and our social channels as an amplifying force, we were effectively about to build hype around sneaker releases and develop deep engagement across multiple channels. This way we were able to provide a constantly updated calendar of releases and compelling content at every touchpoint that we were interacting with our consumers. I helped build the connective tissue between our creative assets, and our programming and app teams to smoothly be able to drive eyeballs to our best content. This give and take allowed us to have multiple touchpoint with our audience and build a deeper connection with them through the entire consumer journey and overall integrated app and social storytelling experience. It is always about the big picture and the long term game plan.
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The power of a push notification is truly an underrated aspect when it comes to the sneaker release world. This is a distinct thing that me and the team realized as we were developing one of the tentpole functions of BR Kicks as a publisher in the industry - the ability to turn the sneaker landscape on it's head by treating the culture the same way you would breaking news or the latest scores for games that recently ended. By giving consumers with a sneaker affinity the ability to subscribe for push notifications that would inform them about the industry ranging the spectrum from alerts about players signing with new shoe brands, rumors about free agents, new color ways, release date reminders, and even e-commerce product promotions. Our ability to uniquely update fans quicker than any other platform behind the widespread social network coverage we had along with the team stream app as a direct pipeline to consumers with amazing cross platform engagement.
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A series that is a great example of encouraging our audience to engage deeper with our content is in the realm of our What If Series which was a take off on the Nike LeBron Watch series where they would drop new color ways of the LeBron 15 sneakers that were inspired by previous sneakers. This series was some of our highest engaged content and we were able to spin it off repeatedly in different formats. Initially began with LeBron's playoff run and capitalizing on some of his big game winners and moments including his Raptors playoff sweep and even him signing with the Los Angeles Lakers, and then evolved to include other sneakers, and inspired some sneaker customizers to create some of these creations as well. By aligning creative output with the company’s core digital platforms, B/R Kicks evolved into a robust and self reinforcing part of the Bleacher Report system rather than an isolated content experiment.
These type of social executions were the perfect intersection between moving quickly to produce engaging social content and capitalizing on the conversation happening organically within our target audience. This obsession with timely original content that resonated deeply with our target audience in an authentic voice from people who are apart of our audience was the secret sauce in being able to get so many successful ideas and experiments done on such a large scale in such short timelines. My ability to act as a producer and a designer and a video editor on top of that paired with our social programming prowess and infrastructure, we were able to repeatedly try out these content series and saw great success with them.
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One of the biggest value propositions for BR Kicks as a brand was an ethos of inclusivity, we wanted to set ourselves apart from other publishers by encouraging our audience to engage in conversations around sneaker culture rather than it just being a one way relationship where we tell them the news or the dates that things are dropping. As such, I wanted to make sure we build a robust plan for content that would encourage comments and deep engagement. For instance, taking a page from our slideshow era, one of our most engaged pieces of content were our NFL and NBA power rankings. Understanding that format could be ported across verticals was a key insight.
I spearheaded a Kicks on Court weekly power rankings initiative that drew comments from top players such as LeBron, Kyrie, and Montrezz Harell as they debated with fans which shoe deserved to be on the list. One of the best ways to do this was through consistent quote card coverage that looked at sneakers from a more holistic and cultural impact perspective. Furthermore, one of the things that was unique that BR Kicks was providing was stats and information related to the sneaker industry. Being able to take things that worked well in one sector of our business and translate them to the kicks space was a powerful tool that I would use to my advantage in both directions, using our national account to inform the growth of our kicks account but then using kicks as an incubator for the national account.
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Sneaker content, no mater how much it was visually driven and about the actual product and it's physical wearability or the aesthetics and storytelling around the sneaker, it was was also important to establish a journalistic backbone of news coverage where we informed our audience and kept them up to date with the sneaker industry. Quote cards were an important tool that I helped streamline into regular production as a tool to amplify interviews, PR blurbs, product information, or even just song lyrics and get them in front of our audience if there was a tie to sneaker culture.
From an editorial standpoint, I also had the chance to be involved in a number of longform and tentpole features around the sneaker space from our yearly sneaker of the year roundups to more specific stories on individual releases. This included articles such as an Illustrated guide to Kobe Bryant's sneaker journey which I had a chance to write, research, and art direct for Mamba day. Or things like our Air Max Day photography feature, and even smaller projects around the NFL. From an art direction standpoint I worked on our Carmelo Anthony feature, another Kobe deep dive and many other editorial articles throughout my time contributing to the Kicks team. On our sneaker of the year projects, I was able to art direct the imagery we used for the different sneakers, and even got to do a limited edition 100 print run of giant posters that we giveaway to our fans as well. These were all impactful projects that helped me hone my copywriting and journalism skills.
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From an experiential side, I had a part in planning some of BR Kicks first and most impactful events to directly interact with our customers. Our first instance of this was our BR99 Pop Up Shop experience in SoHo New York as a partnership with streetwear Brand Kith. I helped curate some of the look and feel, build up the promotional content, and was in charge of developing a one of it's kind "Lab" experience where folks could get their photos taken on a green screen and be placed into one of our iconic basketball memes released through social. Furthermore I also worked on developing Bleacher Report Kicks presence at multiple sneakercons where we had showcases of different sneakers as well as interactive 3D photo booths and march such as sneaker pins or hoodies that I designed and helped produce.
As this evolved and the Kicks brand grew, our flagship winter sneaker culture event was developed under the banner of "The Drop Up" where I worked in conjunction with our marketing team to develop the look and feel and the branding of the event along with the promotional videos and invites as well as the art direction for various exhibits and things like the background visuals for our musical guest Sheck Wes. Setting up events like these were the culmination of the journey that I had been on starting BR Kicks and giving it a voice and developing a distinct look and feel for the brand through the years. Our Kicks team worked with various brands such as Adidas, Levi's, Twitter, StockX, 1800 Tequila, Jason Mark, Honorroller, Chinatown Market, and Showtime to create experiential moments throughout the space.
The BR Kicks team worked closely with members of our event marketing team to bring the ethos of the brand to life. Hosting panel events with influencers from the city, working with endemic brands like Chinatown Market or AmEx to create merchandise and branded content series, having music performances by the likes of Sheck Wes, or having multiple artistic Sneaker installations throughout the sere a major part of thee endeavors.
I had the opportunity to work on the first 3 experiential BR Kicks projects from our initial pop up shop with Kith in 2016 to our annual Drop Up event that began in 2018. I was a part of a team that launched a new 3 episode miniseries during the launch of our Drop Up event as a branded content and ecommerce activation with Chinatown Market called "Friends and Family" that shot with the likes of Suns star Kelly Oubre, viral music video director Cole Bennett of Lyrical Lemonade, and international rap superstar Lil Yachty. The clothing that was shown on the episodes was available for purchase onsite at the Drop up and online on our Bleacher Report shop ecommerce platform.
As the platform matured, my focus increasingly shifted from individual formats to designing a broader cultural operating model that could continually convert proximity to athletes, creators, and designers into sustainable media output. Instead of thinking about talent visits as isolated promotional stops, I treated them as nodes within a dynamic content network that could feed multiple distribution surfaces simultaneously. A single appearance or event or collab could generate short form social clips, serialized video segments, editorial features, and community driven engagement prompts, each tailored to the behavior patterns of different platforms.
This approach created a multiplier effect where one moment of access produced an entire cascade of content assets rather than a single interview. It also reinforced the perception that Bleacher Report was not merely covering sneaker culture but actively participating in it alongside the people shaping it. By structuring the creative pipeline this way, we were able to maintain cultural immediacy while still operating with the strategic discipline expected of a scaled media organization. The model effectively transformed fleeting opportunities into long tail value for the brand and its partners. Over time this ecosystem approach helped position B/R Kicks as a connective layer between athletes, creators, and audiences, reinforcing its relevance well beyond the confines of any single platform. At a leadership level, my role was to continually refine that system so the organization could respond to culture with both speed and strategic clarity.
At the same time, I worked to ensure that the creative infrastructure supporting these initiatives could evolve into something larger than a single vertical. Many of the processes we developed through B/R Kicks, including rapid format prototyping, modular show development, and integrated social distribution, ultimately served as templates for how Bleacher Report could incubate future cultural properties. The playbook we built demonstrated that a lean internal team equipped with the right creative systems could compete with far larger production environments.
This philosophy helped shift internal thinking from campaign based production toward a more agile model of continuous content experimentation. By aligning creative direction with data insights and audience behavior, we were able to make faster decisions about which concepts deserved deeper investment. In effect, the B/R Kicks ecosystem functioned as a real time innovation lab for the broader organization. That influence extended well beyond sneakers, shaping how other teams approached talent driven programming and short form storytelling. From a leadership perspective, the work was less about managing a single brand and more about demonstrating how culturally fluent creative systems could unlock new forms of media growth.
My overall role as a part of the BR Kicks team was to find ways to bring new content to our fans in innovative ways, whether it was through original social executions, or novels shows and series that found ways to tell sneaker stories both with and without access to talent, and even things such as original animation and live shows. Taking a passion project that was a blip in the overall ecosystem of Bleacher Report to an important part of the future of the company and a monetization vertical that is driving over $20 Million dollars of projected revenue year over year is an immense accomplishment that I am truly proud of.
I had the opportunity to wear many hats throughout the growth of B/R Kicks, operating primarily as a creative and art director while also contributing as a writer, producer, director, and hands on maker when the moment called for it. Being on camera in our shows or for interviews and unboxings or live streams was always fun for me and a perkof the job. In the early stages especially, the line between strategy and execution was intentionally porous, which allowed ideas to move from concept to reality with unusual speed. One day that meant developing the visual direction for a new series or refining the brand’s design system, and the next it meant being behind the camera directing a shoot, editing a social video, writing captions, or helping shape the narrative arc of an editorial feature.
That kind of immersion gave me a holistic understanding of how each layer of the brand functioned, from creative ideation and storytelling to distribution and audience response. It also reinforced the belief that the best creative leadership comes from a deep familiarity with the craft itself. Being willing to step into the work directly allowed me to guide collaborators with greater clarity and credibility. The result was a creative environment where ideas could be tested quickly and refined through practice rather than abstraction. That blend of strategic oversight and hands on experimentation was essential in the early years as we worked to define what the brand could become.
At its core, B/R Kicks was built by a small group of highly passionate individuals who genuinely loved the culture we were documenting. What began as a shared enthusiasm among sneakerheads inside the company gradually evolved into something much larger, a legitimate business arm of the organization with its own voice, audience, and commercial momentum. That growth was not the product of a single breakthrough moment but the cumulative result of hundreds of small creative decisions made with care and conviction. Each post, illustration, video, and story contributed to shaping the identity of the platform and the trust we built with the community.
Over time, the passion that initially fueled the project matured into a disciplined creative operation capable of producing consistent cultural impact. Seeing that transition from scrappy experiment to established brand was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. It proved that when creative ambition is paired with thoughtful systems and genuine cultural fluency, even a small internal initiative can grow into something far more enduring. B/R Kicks ultimately became a reflection of that philosophy, a brand born from enthusiasm but sustained through strategy, craft, and collective effort.
Having the chance to shape the voice and editorial attitude of B/R Kicks while developing multiple creative initiatives was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my time at Bleacher Report. From the outset, I was focused on defining a tone that felt culturally fluent, accessible, and rooted in genuine passion for sneaker culture rather than detached commentary. That meant building a platform that could speak to collectors, athletes, designers, and everyday fans with equal authenticity. Every creative decision, from the way captions were written to the design language of the posts, was guided by the goal of making the brand feel both informed and inviting. Over time, that consistency helped establish B/R Kicks as a recognizable voice within the broader sneaker media landscape.
What made the experience particularly rewarding was seeing how the brand evolved from an internal idea into a meaningful presence within the culture. We were not simply publishing content about sneakers but participating in a wider conversation that connected sport, fashion, and identity. Through thoughtful storytelling and creative experimentation, the platform began to stand out as a place where fans could explore the deeper narratives behind the shoes they loved. The work helped position Bleacher Report as a credible participant in a space traditionally dominated by niche blogs and specialized outlets. In that sense, B/R Kicks became more than a vertical; it became a cultural extension of the company itself.
Not only did we plant a stake in the ground and create a lasting brand, but we also built a community that genuinely engaged in informed sneaker conversations. Fans debated releases, shared personal stories about their first pairs, and connected over the history and design lineage of the shoes they followed. That level of engagement demonstrated that the audience was not just consuming content but actively participating in the culture we were helping document. Watching that community take shape reinforced the belief that thoughtful storytelling can transform niche passions into vibrant ecosystems of dialogue. For me, the lasting achievement of B/R Kicks lies not only in its growth but in the community of enthusiasts who continue to engage with the culture through it.
Ultimately the success and growth of the brand came down to two main things; a strong and resilient nimble team of eager sneakerheads who turned a passion into a viable business model, and an attention to detail for creating content whose voice resonated across a broad swath of consumers. As the brand continues to grow and leave it's mark on the industry, I am proud to say I was a part of the team that started it and one of the loudest voices in the room when it came to producing authentic and groundbreaking visual content that would stop people scrolling through their feeds to indulge in the machinations of a crazy sneaker head.
Perhaps the most lasting contribution of B/R Kicks is the blueprint it offered for how subculture can scale without being diluted into cliché. Too often, when large media organizations move into culturally specific spaces, they either become opportunistic or overly sanitized, losing the texture that made the community meaningful in the first place. I was deeply committed to avoiding that trap. The goal was to build a platform that felt informed by lived participation, not by outside observation, and that difference shaped everything from the tone of the captions to the architecture of the franchises to the way we collaborated with creators and talent.
In doing so, we helped prove that mainstream sports media could cover sneakers with credibility, humor, emotional range, and design intelligence, provided the work was led by people who genuinely understood the culture. That lesson extends far beyond this one brand. It points toward a larger model for the future of media in which authority comes less from institutional scale and more from cultural fluency, system level thinking, and the ability to turn audience passion into enduring brand equity. B/R Kicks stands as one of the clearest examples in my career of how vision, craft, and strategy can converge to create something that is both culturally meaningful and commercially durable.
Key Collaborators: Oruny Choi, Christian Pierre, John Marcelo, Bennett Spector, Will Leivenberg, Wutang Chiang, Karena Ore, Matt Sanoian, Ryan Hurst, Mindy Kung, WB Meech, Chris Perez, Kenny Dorset, Giancarlo King, Sam Melvin, Jack Perkins, Sivan Nadler, Lance Fresh, Lawrence Toscano, Dylan Lathrop, Adam Powell, David Garcia, Louis Domingo, Tiauna Smith, Vince Chang, CJ Toledano, Ryan Cole, Jonathan Chan,
Tools: Adobe Creative Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Figma, Cinema 4D, and Sketch, Sony Vegas, Microsoft Excel, Google Docs
Deliverables: Video Graphics Package, Visual Identity, Overlays, Typography, Logo, Photography, Brand Strategy
