Brazil is a tropical country but São Paulo gets pretty cold during the winter. So, can we avoid the usual donations drop boxes and promote the annual Winter Clothing Drive?

A Loja Vazia, or The Empty Shop, is a store at VillaLobos shopping mall, with empty hangers, empty shelves, empty windows. You bring clothes to the shop instead of taking them from the shop.

The space fills with donations during the day and is emptied out at night to receive more pieces the next morning. To encourage donation of clothes in good condition, the shop team creates outfits and displays them as fashion looks. The team also helped donors to create their own looks with their donations.

With only a free space and literally an empty shop, VillaLobos mall managed to collect 3.2 tons of clothes and help thousands of people in need.

The Governor of the State of São Paulo and other Brazilian personalities like footballer Neymar (with 15m followers online) got involved and caught the media’s attention.

Other malls have shown interest in implementing the idea in their countries. So, we’re turning it into an open source project. This means that the shop blueprint, the key visuals and the communication kits are going to be made available for free to anyone to spread goodwill.

The client being a shopping mall, rethinking the consumer-store relationship is very important to the brand and this activation brought much more attention to the cause as a regular clothing donation drive. Also, in place full of fashion stores, a donation drive with a fashion flare brought the public much closer to the cause. The result was a campaign that has reached almost the whole State with earned media.