When purchasing, no-one thinks about the 85 million child labourers behind the fashion. And nobody even considers the fact that many expensive labels also produce at children’s expense. So we made the child labourers behind the expensive designer fashion a reality: with special billboards that looked like they were being held by child labourers. Speech bubbles next to the billboards addressed passers-by with cries for help and enticed them to visit a microsite. Via this site, we distributed a list of brands that do not use child labour in their manufacturing process.

In order to make people aware of the problem of child labour, we invented three luxury fashion brands and made hyper-realistic children’s hands from silicone. We advertised the brands using special billboards to which we attached the silicone hands. This made them look as though they were being held by child labourers. Via speech bubbles on the billboards, the children behind the fashion were given a voice. They told of their terrible working conditions. And addressed their plight directly to the people responsible for their suffering: consumers. This encouraged passers-by to visit a microsite where they found a special list of brands that do not sell clothes sewn by children. The list could be saved as a bookmark on smartphones and thus enabled people to check before each purchase what is behind a brand. Various online measures extended the campaign to the Internet and got the list widely distributed.

The list of brands that do not sell clothing sewn by children was shared thousands of times. The fashion blogger Andrea Morgenstern also became aware of our campaign. She initiated a discussion about child labour among her 100,000 fans that was quickly picked up by other social media campaigns. This ensured that our list was distributed even further. And everyone who uses the list is now able to inform themselves before any purchase as to what is behind a brand. We haven’t of course managed to completely eradicate child labour, but we have at least helped to reduce sales of such products.