L'ERBOLARIO

The Situation

L'Erbolario is one of Italy's most recognised natural cosmetics brands. The brief was to create a TV commercial that could position the brand as a leader in natural beauty, not through a catalogue of ingredients or conventional product claims, but through a stronger emotional idea: making the connection between the brand and nature itself feel tangible.

The strategic challenge was differentiation. Natural beauty advertising often defaults to either a clinical, ingredient-led language or familiar imagery of fields, flowers and untouched landscapes. Neither route gave L'Erbolario a distinctive world. The opportunity was to find a visual expression that could communicate natural authenticity while making the brand feel unmistakably its own.

The Approach

We built the concept around a simple reversal of the usual category story: L'Erbolario's laboratory isn't separate from nature. It is nature. Rather than showing ingredients being taken from a distant landscape and transformed into products, we imagined a world where the laboratory and the natural environment were part of the same place.

That idea became the creative framework for the film. Plants, vines and greenery grow through and around the workspace, allowing research, formulation and nature to coexist within the same visual language. The result was designed to make the relationship between product and ingredient feel inherent rather than explained.

My role was to translate that central idea into a coherent visual world. I shaped the visual direction from concept through production, working with director Roberto Cinardi, DOP Luca Esposito and the production team at BlowUp to establish how the laboratory, vegetation, light and product should work together across the film. The ambition was to create something heightened and dreamlike without losing the credibility of the brand.

Every creative decision was therefore measured against the same principle: the audience should feel that the product comes from this environment and this way of thinking about nature, rather than simply being told that it does.

The Impact

The commercial aired nationally in Italy and reinforced L'Erbolario's position in the natural beauty category.

More importantly, the campaign gave the brand a distinctive visual way to express its relationship with nature. Instead of relying on the category's familiar codes, the film turned the relationship between laboratory and landscape into its own creative territory.

The work demonstrates how a clear strategic proposition can drive the entire visual language of a campaign, from the initial concept through to production, creating a stronger and more coherent expression of the brand.