The Made By You & Cavendish Square project was an activation designed to engage people on a daily basis. The campaign began with the installation of five sets of recyclnig bins that were designed to connect with children and adults alike. The bins engaged people by having a call to action for them to recycle trash in the shopping mall. The bins also notified people of the upcomig activation – that being a pop up store of recycled designer products. Finally, the bins played a central theme in the final installation of the activation, and resulted in a pop up store which created a platofrm for local product designers.

Cavendish Square asked us to create an arts / design activation to be hosted alongside the Cape Town World Design Capital 2014. The brief asked us to illustrate how Cavendish Square is an active player in the positive transformation of Cape Town. The challenge was that people have stopped believing in recycling, and as South Africa’s top eco-shopping centre, Cavendish Square needed its patrons to be on board with their cause.

The centre contributed to sustainability and the development of small and startup enterprises by providing a retail platform that contributed to the combined income for participating designers of R90,000.

Increased brand awareness of the centre’s sustainability initiatives, (through the alignment with strategic business and media partners) achieved a gained media exposure of R2,726,000 (Aug, Sept, Oct 2014). The strategy drove public awareness of the centre’s waste management efforts, resulting in bins having to be emptied twice daily in certain areas. Recycle efficiencies (volume recovered from waste stream) improved overall by 20.4% (2013 vs 2014) and the total waste sent to landfill during 2014 decreased by 23.7% year on year.

As a shopping centre, Cavendish Square’s environmental efforts were not widely known by patrons. In order to communicate this in an engaging and interactive way, we decided to implement a family of friendly, trash-eating bins, encouraging patrons to participate and ‘feed the bins’ by recycling their trash. The daily engagement of these bins ran for one and a half months. When the bins had been ‘fed’ enough recycling materials, the communication changed to say that a pop up store would be coming soon, and that designers were creating products out of the recycled materials that they had been provided with from the bins. Finally, a pop up store was installed and ran for 3 months, functioning as a platform that supported local designers and gave them a place to showcase their wares.