It’s a summer evening at Zero Bond, a private Manhattan club where the lights are low, the net worth high, and the likes of Elon Musk, Gigi Hadid and Shawn Mendes have been spotted. Up on the roof, guests cluster beneath the box hedges, absorbed in cocktails and conversation.
Few of them notice when a particular latecomer appears. He wears a baseball cap, a neck tattoo and a week’s worth of stubble. You might take him for just another downtown hipster—but you would be wrong.
His name is Dominic Ciambrone, and he is the centerpiece of Cadillac’s latest marketing campaign.
Or, rather, his creations are. On his home turf in L.A., Ciambrone is known as the Shoe Surgeon. His regulars include Drake, Justin Bieber and LeBron James. The Surgeon made the chromium Nikes that Usher wore for the 2024 Super Bowl Halftime Show. For LA Clippers forward P.J. Tucker, he whipped up a $250,000 pair of diamond-encrusted Air Jordans.
But it’s not just celebrities that have kept the Surgeon busy for the last several weeks—it’s General Motors.
Cadillac gets its kicks
In a bid to maneuver its electric vehicles into the fast lane of popular culture, Cadillac commissioned the Surgeon to create four limited-edition sneaker collections, each inspired by one of its new electric vehicles: the Optiq, Lyriq, Escalade IQ and Celestiq.
Fresh from their unveiling on Zero Bond’s roof, the shoes make their public debut this week inside Cadillac’s 3,000-square-foot showroom at the U.S. Open, where Cadillac is the official vehicle.
Purchasing cred with sneakerheads might seem like a surprising play for Cadillac, a marque that dates to 1902 and whose drivers evoke corporate boards more than skateboards. But CMO Melissa Grady Dias told ADWEEK that the pairing is thematically sound. The work of both the Surgeon and Cadillac, she said, is “about quality and craftsmanship and luxury. It’s not just a sneaker activation.”
“Nowadays, you can’t walk into Neiman’s Nordstrom or any luxury brand and not see a pair of $1,000 to $5,000 sneakers,” added Cadillac’s associate director of performance marketing Eric Neville. “Sneakers are the new underrated luxe product. That’s the connection that we saw.”
