Concept Work
The thinking, before there is a budget attached.
Nine self-initiated campaigns. None was commissioned; all of them are how we show what we would actually do.
Most of what a studio is hired for cannot be photographed.
The work is the thinking. The thinking is the hard part to show.
A client can look at a finished identity and see craft. What they cannot see is the judgement that got there: what was cut, what was argued for, what the campaign refused to do. That judgement is the thing being bought, and it is nearly invisible in a portfolio of delivered work.
So we set our own briefs. No client, no committee, no compromise to explain away, which means each of these is a clean answer to a question we chose. What you are looking at is not a pitch that failed to sell. It is the argument we would make, made in full.
It is also honest about scale. Every piece here names the thing it was testing, and several of them name where the answer was inconclusive.
Concept
Cartier, Panthère
Jewellery
The house pays for the jewellery and advertises the model. So the ring became the subject and one colour was allowed in the whole campaign.
Concept
Arsenal, Raised in Red
Fan culture
Club marketing is squad photography, identical everywhere. The players change; the supporters do not. Postcards from the postcode instead.
Concept
Alo, Azure Blue
Colour discipline
Sixty per cent blue, thirty orange, ten white, held rigidly. A test of whether a brand world can be built on restraint rather than volume of ideas.
Concept
Loewe, Roasted Vanilla
Fragrance
Fragrance is the one category that cannot show you the product, which is why it defaults to a face. This one photographs what the scent is made of.
Concept
Lacoste, 99% Paper
Craft
A whole golf world cut and folded rather than shot. One material, and the moment a single element renders as glass the conceit collapses.
Concept
Gentle Monster, Heartwear
Eyewear
Four frame concepts and a complete campaign around them, built in forty-eight hours to see whether a capsule can be designed and sold in the same week.
Concept
RIMOWA × Slawn
Collaboration
An unofficial collaboration staged across London, made to test whether two brands with nothing obvious in common can be argued into one world.
Concept
Lacoste, La Cabra
Film
A homage to the GOAT, taken literally. Proof that a single idea held without flinching carries a film further than production value.
Concept
Fragrance Studies
Casting
A body of casting and lighting studies used to pressure-test a direction at campaign quality before a single day is booked.
Every piece on this page is self-initiated. None is commissioned by, affiliated with or endorsed by the brands referenced, and no person depicted is affiliated with AndMelo.
Want this thinking pointed at your brand?
The Luxury Brand Audit is the shortest version: £750, fixed scope, seventy-two hours, and it tells you what is costing you most right now and what we would fix first. If you already know what you want, the brief builder gets you a real proposal rather than a generic one.