The following are pages from our presentation DEck. Although her name eventually changed from Marzi to Zimmie, her spirit stayed true to our original idea.
Zimmie is cut from the same cloth as Mars Blackmon, but speaking fluent right now. She’s a sneakerhead with receipts, a cultural antenna tuned to everything happening in the streets, and a voice living in the middle of a pandemic, social reckoning, and political noise.
She’s fearless. Always on. Deep in the shoes, hip to the history, and loud about what matters. Zimmie doesn’t just wear the brand—she lives it, documents it, and evangelizes it. Built as a living content engine, Zimmie shows up through stories, social drops, and episodic moments—here for the times, and here for the long run. She is the voice of youth, refracted through the NIKE lens.
To keep the character unbound, we developed a second path. An alternate version of Zimmie—a puppet inspired by the spirit of Little Penny—designed to go anywhere and do anything. This format gave NIKE the same storytelling power and cultural voice, without being tied to a live actor, opening the door to faster, freer, and endlessly adaptable storytelling.
At her core, Zimmie was a modern reinterpretation of Mars Blackmon—a female counterpart built from the same DNA, but designed to speak to a new generation and a different moment in culture.
We built a calendar of diverse, NIKE-centric cultural moments for Zimmie to step into and stir up. She interviews the designer behind the Lucky Green and tells them how it should’ve been done. She meets Zion, lets him know she’s next up for her own signature shoe, and fully geeks out inside a fellow collector’s sneaker closet—going a little overboard in the best way possible.
The long-term vision for Zimmie was never a single spot—it was to build a cultural icon. Introduced by Mars Blackmon himself, then set free to take on a life of her own, Zimmie was imagined as a fearless, relatable truth-teller—guiding us through culture as seen through NIKE.
While Zimmie never became a household name and the work ultimately lived as a hero film and cutdowns, Wieden+Kennedy and Spike Lee brought our idea to life with real care and craft.
