TRICKING OUT FORD’S CUSTOM RIDES
Kristen Keenan, Fashion Design ’04, creates paint and upholstery for special Ford vehicles
Kristen Keenan loves what she calls the “Willy Wonka” aspects of her job: “The things going on behind the curtain that you would never imagine.” A colors and materials designer at Ford Motor Co., Keenan grins as she describes “ingress/egress,” a test simulating long-term wear on a vehicle’s upholstery. “A robot gets in and out over and over. It’s literally a robot butt.”
Keenan is part of a team that creates special editions and special trim models of Ford’s vehicles: new takes on familiar mainstays like the Mustang, Maverick, and Bronco. Her job is to give them eye-catching new looks, ranging from the paint and trim on a vehicle’s body to the fabric and stitching on its seats. “We design for a niche customer and we get to push the boundaries.”
The 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo is a low-slung pickup truck with enhanced performance for driving on streets. Some of the model’s biggest enthusiasts are involved in autocross, a sport in which drivers maneuver through a course marked by traffic cones. Keenan’s inspiration for The Maverick Lobo’s bold styling came from an unexpected place: an outdoor basketball court in NYC. Drawn to the court’s lime-green and electric-blue colors, she snapped a picture for reference. Back in Dearborn, Michigan, Keenan, who has previous experience as a shoe materials designer at Nike, created splatter-paint-inspired upholstery and vividly contrasting green-and-blue stitching on the seats and steering wheel, for a street-style feel.
The 2025 Bronco Free Wheeling was “developed to appeal to younger customers,” according to Ford’s communications department, “who appreciate Bronco’s heritage,” but also want a fun, contemporary design. A special edition that retails for a few thousand dollars more than the base trim model (starting price $32,395 vs. $29,795), the Free Wheeling reimagines a popular sunset-inspired design theme that dates back to the ’70s. Its red, orange, and yellow gradient stripes stand out sharply against the SUV’s black paint.
The biggest challenge, Keenan says, was color-matching. “The stripes in the ’70s were reflective, and we wanted to keep that effect for the modern version.” This meant incorporating tiny glass beads into the paint. Because the added ingredient affected the way the eye perceives the color, further adjustments were necessary. The upholstery for the seats required a lot of tweaking too. Keenan designed a black fabric with red, orange, and yellow threads interwoven to create an ombre effect. “It took well over a year to color match because it was difficult to keep the saturation of the colors once it was woven in. When you see all the black, your eyes just dull the color down. So that was a real labor of love, a technical and design labor of love.”
