Canali

Anthology, a digital storytelling platform to celebrate the past and the future of the brand Canali

  • Design
  • Content Design
  • Visual & Interaction Design
  • Technology
  • 2020
  • Challenge
    Creating a digital initiative to celebrate the 85th anniversary of Canali’s birth. A narrative capable of strengthening the group and letting the Canali family and the company’s values come to the surface, with the help of proprietary archive material.
  • Solution
    Anthology is a website that combines a standout visual identity with a strong editorial sensibility. A digital archive (in Italian, English, and Chinese), based on a series of clips and video interviews, dedicated to the production sites and techniques of Canali, a longstanding fashion brand associated with quality and attention to detail.

Canali, a firm specializing in luxury, sartorial apparel for men and a herald of Italian elegance since 1934, is going through a renovation process to better align with the newer trends of men’s clothing. The challenge is to interpret the client’s expectations and exceed them by offering Made in Italy excellence, aesthetical perfection, superior quality of the fabric, and attention to detail. In this context, the storytelling of the company becomes crucial.

 

To celebrate the past, present, and — most importantly — future of a familiar brand that conjugates sartorial tradition with industrial production, we designed a storytelling platform where we gathered the very personal stories of the people that make (and have made) the company what it is. An anthology of records that, together, make up a powerful tool for external communication and brand positioning. Anthology, however, is directed at the people inside the company too.

Anthology is born from the desire to recreate the feeling of flicking through an album of memories. The stories are told in several formats and styles: over 70 videos (short documentaries filmed across Italy, China, and the US), in-depth articles, and other media retrieved from the archive material, like photographs, are the capstone elements of the platform. The website is divided into seven distinct sections:

  • Family, two generations of the Canali family narrating their story;
  • Vision, the brand’s values and mission;
  • Crafts, stories about the product and its sartorial style;
  • People, the thoughts and skills of colleagues;
  • Places, the production centers and the key cities associated with Canali;
  • Heritage, images, key moments, and milestones that have marked the company’s history;
  • Canalipedia, glossary of keywords that help navigate the overarching story of Canali.

A team of videomakers, storytellers, designers, and developers from H-FARM Innovation have worked together with Canali’s marketing team to create the website. They have defined how to conduct the interviews, the architectural structure of the site’s content, and the visual components. Six months were necessary to complete work on the platform. Once the project’s baseline was agreed upon with the client, the first set of interviews with some of Canali’s most influential figures was immediately planned. A set of recurring questions was created to define a linear narrative and thus chart the way forward.

The site’s architecture also began to get drafted, with placeholder tabs and text boxes to give it shape. As the interviews went on, the short documentaries dedicated to Canali’s branches and production techniques got shot. The last thing that got worked on is the translation of the entire website, from English to Chinese.