Rio Campaign
Coolway came to Rio through agency 2manyriders for a footwear campaign that needed more than one postcard shot, it needed the full range of the city. Babilônia handled production for a shoot that moved across Rio in a single arc: from the Copacabana seawall at sunrise, up to a favela viewpoint and its soccer court, and through the backstreets in between. Three worlds, one city, one pair of shoes carrying the story.
The route was the concept. Footwear lives on the ground, so we built the campaign around the surfaces of Rio itself, the iconic Copacabana calçadão at first light, before the crowds; the raw energy of a neighborhood soccer court with the city spread out below; and the in-between spaces where Rio actually happens, the backstreets that don’t make it onto tourist maps.
Moving a production through that many locations in tight windows takes local fluency: sunrise timing on the seawall, access and trust in the favela, and a crew that can pack up and move fast without losing the light. Talent Graziela Gandra and Rafa Fonseca gave the campaign faces that belong in every one of those settings, and the mix of motion and stills captured a product genuinely at home on Rio’s ground.
The campaign gave Coolway a footwear story with real range, beach glamour, street grit, and community energy in a single cohesive body of work, impossible to mistake for a studio production. For Babilônia, it’s another chapter in a growing run of international campaigns produced end to end on our home turf: agencies bring the brand, we bring the city.
