Nike – Shaping Streetwear Culture with Gen Z

Nike is a global brand navigating a fragmented local landscape, where cultural influence is no longer driven by megastars, but distributed across hundreds of micro-communities and emerging creators. To remain relevant in Australian streetwear, Nike needed deep, reciprocal relationships with the young people actually shaping culture in this hyperlocal context.Our challenge was to go beyond traditional consumer research - which extracts insight without giving anything back - using design methods that genuinely involve young people as co-researchers. We wanted to hear how their communities shape culture, Nike's place within it, and surface strategic implications across partnerships, products, stores and platforms.

We partnered with 16 emerging creators across Melbourne and Sydney—at the intersection of fashion, art, sport and music—and upskilled them to be researchers in their own communities. Each participant received an ethnographic kit: a camcorder and field guide to document their lives over two weeks, generating 250+ qualitative video diaries.Insights were synthesised through collective sense-making workshops, where participants ideated directly with Nike on how to build stronger community relationships. The process was co-produced: from research design (shaped by a creator with over one million TikTok views) to the final hypereel, with an original track by one of the participants.

This research fundamentally shifted how Nike approaches community engagement in Australia. By centering young people as researchers and storytellers rather than subjects, it produced richer, more actionable insight than traditional focus groups could deliver.The 16 participants gained design research skills and a global platform. Nike gained an authentic window into the micro-communities shaping local culture. The project outcomes gave emerging creators a direct route to a global brand audience, modelling a new standard for how commercial research can create genuine, reciprocal value.