For its very first global collection, Melissa decided to highlight one of Brazil's
biggest assets: the Amazon. Therefore they asked Casa Darwin to come up with
a name for the collection and content for the advertising materials, the
Plastic Dreams magazine and the Melissa Galleries around the world.
Rodrigo Leão, the ECD of Casa Darwin asked me to jump
on board again, and together we came up with the idea of
using the jungle as a way to talk about stepping into the
unknown: about exploring people's perception of what
the Amazon is, their fears, dreams and the kind of crazy
beautiful creatures they expect to find out there.
With that creative direction came the campaign tagline
"Discover. Explore. Play.", which not only refers to the
shoe collection, but also to the origins of it. And talking
about that, we needed to populate this territory with the
kind of creatures that would live up to people's imagination,
but that would also relate to the products.
So we thought of bugs. Those beautiful, crazy shaped,
alien-like bugs. Then we thought of flowers. Those exotic,
almost too weird to be true type of flowers. We also thought
of all those small, incredible species that live in the jungle
and make the Amazon an enormous pool for biodiversity.
Then we asked Melissa to design some shoes around those species - which they
did - and on our end, we went the other way around and created, then designed,
creatures based on the shoes they came up with.
In the following pages you can see the results of the endeavour. We called the
collection "Melissa Amazonista", and it should be on shelves, magazines and feets by late 2010.
CD/CW: Rodrigo Leão
CHARACTER DESIGN: 1stAveMachine / Vinicius Costa
PHOTOGRAPHY: Amber Gray / 1stAveMachine
AGENCY: Casa Darwin
Year: 2010
