Every day, 200 children go missing in Brazil. A severe public safety crisis, too disturbing for politicians to acknowledge. Despite the alarming scale of this problem, it remains largely invisible to society. Mães da Sé, an NGO founded by mothers of missing children, tirelessly works to reunite families. Yet, they struggle for visibility in a country captivated by celebrity culture—a cause without attention in a world of attention without cause.
Our objective was to pressure politicians for change, and we needed opinion leaders to amplify the cause and make missing children visible. Instead of relying on traditional awareness methods, we hacked Brazil’s latest streetwear obsession—bootleg T-shirts, a fashion trend that serves as a cultural platform for self-expression.
Our idea: replace the famous faces typically featured on these T-shirts with the faces that truly need visibility—missing children. Using AI-powered age progression, high-quality fashion design, and the unique talent of creators at Galeria do Rock (the center of street culture in Brazil), we created T-SEARCH®: the #OutfitOfVisibility.
By embedding the campaign within fashion, influencer culture, and mainstream media, we turned a fashion statement into a political plea, transforming a street trend into a movement for awareness and change.
T-SEARCH®: The #OutfitOfVisibility. This streetwear-inspired campaign reimagined bootleg T-shirts as a platform for social impact—a powerful tool to raise awareness and mobilize society to join the search. With this in mind, the strategy was to provoke celebrities, private spaces of media and politicians to donate their visibility to the cause. And the mobilization was huge! By transforming missing children into real celebrities, we finally brought the attention this cause deserves.
The campaign turned the simplicity of T-SEARCH® into a chain of kindness that captured the media and the hearts of millions of people across Brazil. The NGO Mães da Sé was finally able to gain the attention it had long desired and, with it, receive all the possible help to find their missing children.
