The 2025 Collab of the Year report is a new playbook for marketers.
- Use the Collab Index to help guide your own brand collaborations, regardless of category. This is a framework that breaks down the ideal collaboration formula, featuring questions that everyone should ask themselves before pressing "go" on a partnership that could fall flat.
- Learn valuable brand-building takeaways from every single sneaker collaboration that features on the list, from "fandom precision", to world-building, to audience participation, to scarcity tactics, to cultural depth.
- Hear from expert perspectives on how to create cultural resonance, relevance and desire, with clear strategic advice backed up by a panel of cultural experts and Tracksuit data.
Download the full 2025 Collab of the Year report, opens in new tab, in partnership with Bimma Williams.
In 2025, the brand collaboration space is cluttered. Collabs are one of the loudest languages in marketing and every category is desperately reaching for them, hoping it will achieve cross-demographic success, from Taco Bell × Cheez-It to SKIMS × Nike. But not that many speak the language fluently, and businesses are struggling to make collabs that resonate.
We want to change that. Tracksuit has partnered up with Bimma Williams to help brands with tackling that challenge: in a world full of noise, how do collaborations create cultural momentum?
2025 Collab of the Year is a first-of-its-kind report balancing consumer data and expert opinions to uncover what makes a brand collaboration truly work, both culturally and commercially. It blends cultural expertise by Williams and his panel of Collab Cousins, a global network of creators, strategists, and operators, with Tracksuit's data, gathered from over 2000 U.S consumers. Together, we've created the Collab Index: a data-driving scoring system.
Using the Collab Index, we've ranked the top 10 sneaker collaborations of the year to make meaning out out of their success.
Tracksuit is very excited to partner with Bimma Williams on this project, who was once called "the voice of collabs", opens in new tab by Hypebeast. "As Williams continues to spark conversations with the sneaker world, he gave us a glimpse behind corporate curtains and broke down why collaborations aren’t as special as they used to be," Hypebeast writes. He has also featured on ADWEEK's Creative 100 and Footwear News' 2025 Sneaker Power List.
Specificity is everything
The biggest lesson from the year's top sneaker collaborations is that scale is secondary, and specificity is everything. The partnerships that created the most impact weren't the loudest, the most famous, or most widely seen.
The data shows that the collaborations that moved brands forward weren't designed for everyone, they were designed for someone. That is, they were built for a small, passionate audience, which proved to be more valuable than millions of passive viewers.
For example, our top collaboration (download the report, opens in new tab to find out which one this is!) achieved only 4% general awareness, but 67% among fans familiar with the brand an collaborator. Alignment is the engine.
“The strongest collaborations don’t chase virality. They build meaning,” said Matt Herbert, Cofounder of Tracksuit. “When brands design for the right audience with the right partner, they create depth instead of noise.”
Why did we choose sneakers?
No category has stress-tested collaborations more than sneakers. Some releases shift the whole conversation the moment they hit the feed. Others disappear so fast you’d swear they launched in airplane mode. That range is exactly why sneakers give us the clearest read on how collaborations actually change a brand, all in plain sight.
For example, in 1985, Nike paid Michael Jordan (then, a rookie basketball player) $500K to collaborate on a sneaker. In 2024, the Jordan brand at Nike was the best performer out of all the company’s divisions – sales hit $7 billion in revenue.
This playbook built by Nike and Jordan proved to the industry that a strong collaboration can outperform traditional advertising and has unbeatable commercial impact. As a product, sneakers serve as the perfect canvas for a brand collab, combining colorways, materials, and a deeper story about identity. Sneakers are also universal (everyone needs shoes) and purchased repeatedly (through new seasons, worn-out pairs, and fashion cycles).
About Tracksuit
Tracksuit is the beautiful, always-on brand tracking platform trusted by over 1,000 consumer brands worldwide. Tracksuit surveys thousands of people each week to deliver insights on key brand metrics—awareness, consideration, usage, preference, and perception—across markets, demographics, and competitors. Founded in 2021, the company operates in 25 markets, including the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand.
If you're thinking of launching a brand collaboration soon, we can establish important brand-health benchmarks before you take the big swing, help attribute the collaboration to brand growth and then track if the messaging landed long-term. And since we’re always on, you only have to wait 30 days till insights roll in — and they update every month.
