Foot Locker’s European business has opened its partnership with 72andSunny Amsterdam by building a brand film around its own shop-floor employees and four decades of archive silhouettes. The account change sets the creative direction for the region where it competes hardest.
Foot Locker’s European business has released a brand film that runs back through four decades of sneakers, from Jordan and the Nike TN to Saucony, Asics and On. “Then. Now. Always.,” out Aug. 13, is the first work from the agency that won the retailer’s regional account in March.
72andSunny Amsterdam took the EMEA creative business after a competitive review, and this film sets the tone for everything that follows it. Managing director Hollie Loxley has said the partnership rests on the idea that brands are built through culture rather than through volume of messaging. The result leans on history instead of the season’s product. Foot Locker sold most of the shoes in the film, a history rivals can’t simply buy.
And it has rivals. JD Sports Fashion has scaled hard across the same high streets, while Snipes built its business on the street credibility this film claims. Nike, meanwhile, has spent the period since Elliott Hill took over in late 2024 restoring allocation to the wholesale partners it once walked away from, and the product now goes to retailers who can prove they matter culturally.
Brand equity has become an input into how much stock a retailer gets.
The people in the striped shirts
The film belongs to the Stripers, the staff who wear them, and they appear less as salespeople than as members of the scenes they served. Foot Locker counts more than five decades of them at home and over 40 years in Europe.
That’s the smartest part of the campaign. A brand selling direct can copy a retailer’s assortment, its app and its store design. It can’t copy 40 years of conversations across a counter. Slavka Jancikova, VP Marketing EMEA, put it in personal terms, describing a favorite pair of trainers as the marker of a first day or a first win. The Stripers are there to make that claim credible.
The silhouettes doing the work
The film chooses its eras carefully. Jordan opens it. Then comes the Nike TN, drawn up by Sean McDowell and sold from 1998 as a Foot Locker exclusive, a deal that held until roughly 2016. French buyers called it the Requin after the shark-like gradient on the upper, and it stuck to the estates outside Paris and Marseille and to UK rave style. The adidas that follows arrived in 1965 under another name entirely, the Robert Haillet, and only became the Stan Smith in 1978. The film catches up with it much later, on the terraces in Manchester rather than on a tennis court.
Then it lands on shoes Foot Locker can sell this week: New Balance, running-heritage brand Saucony, Asics and On. Archive runners have carried the lifestyle market for the past three years, and that suits a multi-brand retailer, because pulling a heritage range together means curating across labels rather than going deep on one.
Where it runs
The film runs in France, Italy and the UK across connected TV, digital, social and out-of-home, with in-store content everywhere else in EMEA and murals in the same three countries. Those are the markets where the scenes in the film actually happened. It also feeds the retailer’s weekly social show and a Back to School push built around exclusives.
Views won’t settle this. What will is whether Nike, adidas and the rest start handing Foot Locker the product and the exclusives that come with being treated as a gatekeeper again, and whether Dick’s Sporting Goods, which bought the chain last September, keeps paying for brand work when the next campaign comes around.
