As the sandal season of spring and summer starts, we start to think more kindly of the lowly extremities that support us in our daily activities: namely, our feet. A special magazine created by foot product manufacturer Hansaplast and the creative studio BEING France imagines a foot-centric world, one where reading is done at a leisurely pace and pages are flipped with manicured toes.
A promotional video showcases some of the magazine's special features. These include a thick, varnished paper stock selected by BEING so that the pages can be easily turned by the hands' less prehensile counterparts, and a larger type that allows you to read from further away.
"When we researched about footcare and the target, we discovered that the typical footcare consumer was actually younger and more active than the traditional Hansaplast band-aid target (families, 35-50 yo)," said BEING's Marie Reynaud. "To attract this younger target audience, we had to help the brand switch its brand perception from a serious healthcare plaster brand to an aspirational care brand."
The lighthearted magazine's content includes foot fashion, foot art (which includes interesting details from well-known paintings of expressive feet), foot society, foot fun and games and a foot horoscope.
The fashion magazine aesthetic brings some needed cachet to a particularly unglamorous section of the drugstore. A set of whimsical photos feature some fancy footwork as models adroitly perform tasks usually done with the hands, such as holding a deck of cards and blowing a kiss.
The magazine and promotional video were created to promote a new product range called FootExpert, which includes an anti-callus cream, a deodorant, an antiperspirant, and a regenerating foot cream. A website that is linked from the shareable YouTube video offers a €1.50 coupon on these four products – and a PDF of the magazine that you can peruse yourself, albeit on a monitor or touch screen rather unsuited to our forgotten appendages.
The transformation from a boring product brochure to a luxury magazine brings a typical drugstore brand to a glamorous level for people who are interested in the form of their feet as well as their function. Perhaps there will be more foot fetishists in the future.