"Welcome to Beauty" is Long Haymes Carr's take on Thomasville Furniture Industries' new Bellasera line.
"This furniture makes a very high-end, visual statement," said Mylene Pollock, creative director at the Winston-Salem, N.C., agency. "We wanted to humanize and capture this kind of pan-Mediterranean seductive opulence, and build an almost voyeuristic need to 'Have it my my house now!' "
The $6.5 million print and television effort for the North Carolina furniture maker does just that. Work features evocative images of exotic Mediterranean women--Moroccan novelist Bernadette Trini-dad and Italian photographer Cora-lita Alphonso among them--awash in the "luxury," "passion" and "beauty" embodied in the collection.
"We're living in a new Dynasty era," Pollock said. "People are building 8,000-square-foot mansions. The question is what do you fill them with quickly?"
The client's answer: Bellasera.
Print breaks in the August editions of Vanity Fair, InStyle, Martha Stewart Living, Smithsonian and other lifestyle periodicals.
The broadcast campaign kicks off this week on 15 cable outlets including A&E, Lifetime and MSNBC.
Copywriter Sims Bullock and art director Keith Borshak worked on the campaign. Visuals were captured in Miami by director Todd Bellanca of New York-based Zooma Zooma Productions.