Nike’s U.S. World Cup kits leave an opening for independent designers to meet demand

At first, Chris Bunn wasn’t going to tweet his US national team kit mockups.

While the platform specializes (for better and for worse) in capturing people’s off-the-cuff thoughts in 280 characters or less, it was harder for Bunn to nudge himself to post his designs.

He hadn’t been laboring over them for long: Bunn, a self-described “beleaguered” Arsenal fan, estimates he knocked three designs out over the course of the Gunners’ clash with Manchester United on September 4. In the age of social media , his restraint on sharing them was borderline counter-cultural.

However, like so many fans of the sport around the world, Bunn swapped messages with friends in his native Raleigh, NC and beyond. One, an unseen protagonist of this story named John, liked the designs and suggested that Bunn put them out there. After all, Nike had just released some uninspiring US kits, and fans were asking if they were really the finest looks that a team playing at a World Cup could don.

Very quickly, Bunn was validated. There could be a better way, and this vision was sitting as a file on his desktop.

Compose new tweet, attach images, send tweet.

“The one thing I’ve learned in marketing is timing is truly everything sometimes,” Bunn, who works as the product design lead for Kickfin, a software company out of Austin, Texas, told The Athletic. “You had Nike and the US men’s national team putting out something that was effectively panned by the fan base. Then here’s this other guy, this random dude on Twitter, posting his concept art that people gravitate towards, because — to be honest — it has personality, has American identity to it.