Li-Ning NEW ARRIVAL
Project Overview
Li-Ning had been on the shelves of Qatari sports retailers for years. The local audience knew the brand. They didn't yet wear it.
The 2025 New Arrival drop was the campaign that closed the gap.
Client
Li-Ning
Role
Campaign direction
Fashion
Retail
Year
2025
Brief
Li-Ning's problem in the local market wasn't recognition. It was permission. Arab consumers in the GCC saw Li-Ning as a Chinese-imported alternative to the brands they already trusted — visible on the shelves, but not yet in the consideration set when they got dressed for the gym or the court.
The brief was to make the Arab consumer want to be seen in Li-Ning. Not to make the brand look local. To make it look worth wearing.
Approach
Eight MENA models, cast for aspiration rather than familiarity. Five locations across Doha, chosen for what they signalled rather than what they showed. Four product categories, each one treated as its own editorial pitch rather than as a catalogue page.
Running — the marina boardwalk, late-morning natural light, fashion-grade compositions. Single-colour wardrobe palette per look, real running positions, the brand mark held quiet.
Basketball — outdoor court, mid-action and direct-address frames at low angle. The product stills — shoes hung from a chainlink fence by their laces — borrowed the visual grammar of streetwear sneaker culture, not sports catalogue.
Training — controlled gym interiors. Real exercise positions, real form, the discipline of the lift rendered as quietly as a high-end performance brand would render it.
Lifestyle — a wider tonal range, from streetwear (the BADFIVE line against graffiti walls) to neutral-palette casual against stone and palm-tree backdrops. The category where the brand earned its style permission, not just its athletic one.
This case study leads with the stills. The campaign also ran short reels across the same four categories as paid social — but the stills are the stronger showcase of the creative direction, so they're the work shown here.
Result
In 4-month content posting plan of the campaign, Li-Ning's local Instagram following doubled. 4K to 8K. The campaign and the social account were run by the same company — my own — which made the attribution direct.
Follower count is a softer commercial metric than sell-through. But for a brand whose problem wasn't recognition but permission, social-platform following is the metric that should move. Recognition doesn't translate into follows. Aspiration does. The audience who followed Li-Ning's account in the weeks after the campaign was the audience who'd decided they wanted to be seen in it.
The number doesn't just report what the campaign did. It confirms the diagnosis of what the brand needed.