L'ERBOLARIO

The Situation

L'Erbolario is one of Italy's most recognised natural cosmetics brands. The brief was a TV commercial that would position them as a leader in natural beauty — not by listing ingredients or making claims, but by making people feel the connection between the brand and nature itself.

The challenge was tone. Natural beauty advertising tends to fall into two traps: either it looks clinical and scientific, or it looks like stock footage of fields and flowers. L'Erbolario needed something more distinctive. Something that felt true to the brand's identity without looking like every other natural cosmetics ad on Italian television.

The Approach

We built the concept around a visual metaphor: L'Erbolario's laboratory isn't separate from nature. It is nature. The idea was to show the brand's researchers at work inside a space where the boundary between lab and forest doesn't exist. Plants, vines, and greenery grow through and around the workspace. The research is happening inside the landscape, not extracted from it.

The tone was deliberately dreamlike. Not fantasy, not fairy tale, but a heightened version of reality that made the connection between product and ingredient feel inevitable rather than manufactured. We worked with director Roberto Cinardi and DOP Luca Esposito to build a visual language that felt lush without being precious. Every frame needed to communicate that the product comes from this place, from this way of thinking about nature.

I art directed the production from concept through to delivery, working closely with the director and production team at BlowUp to ensure the visual world we built held together across every shot.

The Impact

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

The visual metaphor gave the brand a distinctive way to talk about its relationship with natural ingredients that went beyond the standard category approach. It was a piece of work that trusted its audience to understand the idea without having it explained to them.