#TBT: YATAY Uses Poetry to Capture the Circle of Life

In a film directed by Tuscany-born director Andrea Marini, Italian eco-footwear company YATAY introduces us to a very emotional and quite fascinating story that makes us question humanity’s future if we keep giving nature the “greedy treatment.” During this week’s #ThrowBrandThursday column, the Milan-based company’s “Circle of Life” campaign is in our spotlight, a poetic manifesto that the brand has conceived together with independent creative studio Avocad Film Studio to highlight a great threat the world is facing currently.

The Circle of Life is a three-stanza-long poem written by Maddalena Giusto, whose words help readers unlock the past, explore some of humanity’s important “eras,” and contemplate the actions they must adopt to allow nature to thrive at its own pace and, thus, continue its cycle. Tapping into poetry and visually complemented by the film’s images, the message YATAY wishes to pass on to the world feels authentic, inviting viewers to follow nature’s gracious rhythm. To sync with it, they must listen to its melodious songs. But in order to untangle the meaning of the “lyrics” and truly connect with the environment, people should make some changes in their behavior first (and rethink their fashion choices as well).

Promoting a shoe and sharing an environmental message at the same time seems to be a pretty difficult task; but not for YATAY, which managed to depict its product as if it were a natural element that has always been part of the landscape. Dividing its story into three acts — the beginning, the middle, and the end — the company uses a poetic storytelling to narrate people’s behavior concerning the environment.

The first structure takes us to a time when humans have started to learn how to decipher nature’s treasures and keep up with its pace. Once humanity understood how nature works, we happily embraced it. But then our ego, envy, and greed took over, threatening to destroy the heavenly place contoured in the first act. “We pushed our luck too far / Until we fell apart.”

However, it is only in the third segment that we learn that there is still hope, as Earth indicates the many possibilities of what we could be “If we stand up on our feet / Finding a way to harmony.” Created to call for “a collective awakening,” the campaign’s message “is intended to be direct: If we are willing to change our behaviors, a new life in harmony with nature IS possible. At last, we are one thing.”

Traveling back to humanity’s very beginning might sound like a very long journey but the director managed to capture the very essence of this experience in less than two minutes. So, are you in for this one-of-a-kind adventure?