A campaign for ciele’s entry into China, turning the brand’s most recognizable icon — the running cap — into a visual anchor for a new beginning.

Founded in Montréal, ciele is a running brand built around performance, bold color, and design. As ciele entered the Chinese market, “Starting From the Head” marked its first official launch campaign, centered around a half-marathon run on Yuyuan Road in Shanghai. We were invited to create the Key Visual and campaign visual system, shaping the brand’s first visual impression in a new market.

The idea of a new beginning leads directly back to where ciele began: the cap. We placed it at the center of the visual system — repeating, cutting, layering, and exaggerating its scale until a familiar product becomes an almost surreal landscape. The cap moves beyond being an object and becomes the campaign’s primary visual anchor.

Built around running between the city and the outdoors, FROM HEAD INTO THE WILD extends the concept into a broader visual world. Runners, caps, apparel, maps, routes, trees, mountains, and landscape textures are fragmented and reassembled through hand-torn collage, allowing urban information and organic forms to coexist within the same frame.

The palette draws from two key colors of ciele’s collection at the time — a rich blue-green and vivid magenta. Their saturated contrast carries the energy of movement, while torn paper edges, scanned textures, hand-drawn imagery, and aged print effects introduce a tactile, analogue quality. Together, these elements create a visual language that feels free, raw, and tactile — carrying a constant sense of movement and energy.

The system extends from the core Key Visual across posters, in-store displays, event environments, and merchandise. Across different scales and formats, the elements are continuously taken apart and reassembled, allowing the cap to remain a recurring visual anchor throughout the campaign and creating a flexible visual system built for ciele’s first chapter in China.