Nothing’s collaboration with Gully Labs on the Xoloni Orange sneaker shows how a tech brand can enter fashion without feeling like a gimmick. Rooted in CMF Phone 2 Pro’s design language, the modular shoe emerged from an open #DesignCMFKicks challenge, centring community, young creatives, and authenticity rather than pure hype or tech money spectacle.
Scroll through the headlines that pile up daily across fashion media, and it will not be long before you encounter an op-ed, a panel discussion, or a quietly alarmed news piece about the industry's increasingly complicated relationship with technology. Tech money is not just buying advertising space in fashion publications anymore. It is buying the publications, funding the galas, and sitting front row at the shows. The second The Devil Wears Prada film, arriving decades after Miranda Priestly first made an assistant cry over a cerulean sweater, found its central villain not in a tyrannical editor but in tech money swallowing prestige fashion whole.
Safe to say, the fashion enthusiasts don't quite like tech bros taking up more space at the table.
Except that in India, when Nothing's CMF arm revealed the Xoloni Orange sneaker designed in collaboration with Gully Labs, the fashion guys were ecstatic.
But what gives? I asked this question to Akis Evangelidis, Nothing’s co-founder and India President. And as cliché as it sounds, the answer lies in being true to yourself.
"Sometimes brands use fashion as a one-off campaign because they need to position a product as a fashion accessory. For us, it has been ingrained since we started,” he explains.
"I hate the thought that a tech brand is a tech brand, just talking about specs and nice-looking products”.
“I think we grew up with Apple,” he continues, “which was a brand for young creatives, making very cool products that stood out and generated a lot of excitement. We build Nothing for the new generations of creatives. So for us, it was important to engage with the creative community and do more things - cool things - and see where exploration leads."
Financially, this exploration brought about the brand’s community investment rounds, where beyond investing in the brand, elected members of Nothing’s user community would sit in board meetings and have a say in how the brand appeals to its users (Nothing loves itself its little niche, if you can call it niche). But more recently, this engagement with the community brought about the #DesignCMFKicks challenge with Gully Labs that led to the limited-edition Xoloni Orange sneakers, which is where this story starts.
The design challenge, run under #DesignCMFKicks, invited creators across India to reimagine Gully Labs' GL001 silhouette using the visual and material language of CMF Phone 2 Pro. Over a thousand entries arrived. The brief was this: if the CMF Phone 2 Pro were a shoe, what would it be? Now this sounds simple to you and me, but in practice, a lot goes into making a sneaker out of a phone design.
Just ask Dhreetimaan Sarmah, the designer who won the challenge, about how something as small as the exposed screws you see on Nothing’s phones became an entire lesson in product design.
“Because it's my first time making a sneaker - a physical product - I didn't know the technicalities of product design.” He has a prototype of the final kicks on call, and shows it around as he explains. “My initial design had lots of screws. I added screws on the back tab, on the sides, on the front… But then I got to know about the feasibility of things. You cannot place screws all over the sneaker, right? If you place a screw on the vamp, for example, one can get hurt.”
The end product is a pair that earns its limited-edition stature. The Xoloni Orange (pronounced ho-lo-nee orange) is a modular sneaker that translates CMF by Nothing's industrial design language into footwear. The pair gets its name from the Assamese word for change, drawing from a detachable quarter panel system that allows you to swap between black, orange, mint and grey suede inserts. It’s built in orange suede with orange and black softy leather panels. Screws integrated into the toe area and a extendable rear strap add a utilitarian touch. Gully Labs branding appears on the heel counter; CMF branding sits on the tongue label.
Dhreetimaan comes from Assam’s Dhemaji district. He had been in art school as a kid, but his biggest push towards designing came during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, when he taught himself digital art from YouTube. He would post his art online, building his own little community. “I started working with local musicians in Assam and made album covers for Spotify. Through that, I gained a few followers and a small fan base through word of mouth.”
The audience that came with those commissions was small, so he developed a method: he would make unsolicited character illustrations for Instagram fashion brands, wearing their products, and send the work across. If the brand shared it, their audience would find him. It was a cold-outreach model built entirely on the quality of the output, and it worked.
“I think it's one of the best ways to showcase your work right now,” he says about open challenges like the #DesignCMFKicks. To him, there’s no place like the internet to grow as an artist. “Just put your work online so people can see it. Like-minded people will eventually find it and appreciate it. If you have some skills and people don't know about it, then it is useless.”
The online gamble paid off. The nine months that followed took him from a digital rendering to a production-ready shoe, through material failures and manufacturing constraints that no design programme teaches in the abstract.
The Xoloni Orange had its final drop at the Nothing Store in Bengaluru on May 30, 2026. The pairs sold out. Dhreetimaan Sarmah is currently serving a summer internship with Gully Labs in Noida, split across the product development and graphic design teams, working on undisclosed briefs while continuing his freelance practice on the side. He returns to design school in Assam for his seventh semester later this year, before his graduation project.
Evangelidis does not frame the shoe as the project's primary outcome. "It pleases me a lot, to be honest, and I think that's the part I'm most proud of," he says, referring to where Sarmah has ended up. “For us, it's important, through both our products and what we do beyond them, to provide platforms for those young creatives to thrive.”
As it seems, Zuckerberg can keep the front row seat. Nothing has been a part of the Tech vs. Fashion conversation, too, when Charlie Smith, head of marketing and communication activities for LOEWE, was announced as their Chief Brand Officer. But what separates a good fashion-tech collab from a one-time gimmick is what it does for everyone involved, and the conviction with which it is done.
Good ol-fashioned honesty to oneself does go a long way, after all.