Convoy art directs Nike Atelier’s campaign for footballer Désiré Doué — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Nike Atelier is a high-end, handcrafted line built around one athlete at a time, with a wardrobe of apparel tailored exactly to their measurements. Désiré Doué is its first footballer to receive this treatment, and the third athlete after tennis players Maria Sharapova and Jannik Sinner. For his 2026 World Cup debut with France, Nike produced a collection it calls Nike Atelier’s Merc Premium for Désiré Doué: a custom jacket, made-to-measure shorts and the Merc Premium boots. Paris-based agency Convoy was commissioned to art direct the campaign that launched them.

“The couture framing provided a clear starting point: craftsmanship, expressed through a more minimal and elevated approach. We worked with Nike to move away from the usual football-launch codes of speed, technology and spectacle,” Co-founder Nordine Benotmane tells us, “creating more space around the athlete and the product. The specificity began with what Nike had created for Doué, from the tailored fit to the bespoke elements. Together, we built the campaign around those details, making the Atelier codes central to his story and giving the work a character that felt unmistakably his.”

For the Merc Premium, Nike took the leather upper of the original 1998 Mercurial R9, a football boot, and set it on the royal blue sole of the Pegasus Premium, a running shoe. “The product already held that tension between Nike’s archive and something distinctly contemporary, and that became the basis for the art direction. We approached the shoe through a more artistic and pared-back lens,” Benotmane explains, “focusing on its form, materials and construction rather than explicitly referencing the past.”

Inside a stripped-back, off-white studio, the campaign puts Doué in the middle of the design process. Around him, the tools and rituals of a workshop are remade as graphic, sculptural forms. “For each Nike Atelier campaign, we worked with photographers who have their own experimental and tactile approach to image-making. From there, the photographer becomes part of that creative dialogue, interpreting the idea of craft in their own way, sometimes through literal, handmade techniques and sometimes through more subtle choices within the image-making process,” Benotmane notes.

Convoy also developed a wordmark and icon for Atelier, creating a visual identity rooted in Nike’s history. “It was important to create a distinct language that still felt inherently part of the Nike world. We drew on Greco-Roman lettering and the Nike archive,” Benotmane explains, “developing a customised version of Moulin Light for the wordmark. Its sculptural, flared forms gave Atelier a sophisticated and refined identity.” An icon drawn from the same history sits alongside it, taking its cue from an ancient Greek coin that shows the goddess Nike placing a wreath on a trophy.