As the New York Liberty star is set to launch her own signature shoe with Nike, she details the design process of her first logo with Boardroom.
Some logos are more simple than others. As Sabrina Ionescu describes it, her new signature mark fits that description.
“It’s an ‘S’ … if anyone didn’t know that,” she jokes.
While the bold first letter of her first name stands as the identifier atop the tongue of her first signature sneaker, the Nike Sabrina 1, there is a little more nuance to the shape and styling than she initially lets on.
The two negative spaces within the letter are shaped like a pair of eyes, a nod to her court vision. While some player logos can be more involved, abstract, or even overdone, that wasn’t Ionescu’s hope for her debut icon.
“I really liked something clean and simple,” she continued. “I didn’t want anything that was going to be too much or too complicated. There’s an ‘I’ within the ‘S’. It’s clean and simple. There’s a lot of hidden details, but I really just liked how clean and simple it is and how you’ll know that it’s my logo.”
Along the logo that can be found on both the tongue and midfoot of the outsole, there’s also a subtle design detail that wraps around the entire shoe, connecting her two initials together into the sneaker, for an added signature touch.
“There’s a lowercase ‘i’ that perimeters the entire shoe,” describes designer Ben Nethongkome. “From the start of the tongue top, all the way down the toe, to the outsole, and then back again up the heel. That was a prominent detail that we wanted to celebrate for her.”
For every signature athlete – a tier that Ionescu realizes has only included a select dozen players over the WNBA’s 27-year history – creating their own logo becomes an essential part of the two-year-long timeline.
In a similar spirit, the naming of her sneaker followed an equally simple process.
“My last name isn’t the easiest to pronounce,” she said, with a laugh. “So, we thought that ‘Sabrina’ was definitely safer.”
Launching this summer in an initial batch of three colorways, Ionescu has hopes that her debut signature model will extend into a franchise for years to come, helping to inspire the next generation of players ahead.
“There were definitely three or four names that we had come up with,” she revealed. “That was the one that really stuck with me, and with it being my first signature shoe, we wanted to call it the Sabrina 1.”
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