endota celebrates wellbeing and strength with new brand evolution via Bastion

Much-loved Australian brand endota has this month embarked on a significant step-change with the launch of its new nourish.nuture.you campaign in partnership with Bastion – supporting endota’s growth from a spa business to a leader in wellbeing across its spas, products, education, and digital wellness offerings.

Through the lens of three accomplished photographers – shooting with no wardrobe, no hair and makeup, only natural lighting and no retouching – the endota campaign shows what beautiful truly looks like and brings into focus the brand’s holistic wellbeing offering.

The new creative direction includes a reinvention of the iconic endota malachite brand mark and talent recast to showcase the beauty of diversity, connection found in vulnerability and the power of strength in self.

It is an approach that endota’s founder and CEO Melanie Gleeson says is a representation of the vision she had for the business from the beginning and is aligned to endota’s transition from retail spa network to a wellbeing leader that creates results-based skincare, performs treatments in spa, educates beauty and massage therapists through its certified wellness colleges and offers a complete online hub of wellness tools to its customers and members.

Says Gleeson: “While the business has grown and evolved exponentially over the past 20 years, the goal has always been to make people feel better and to make wellbeing a healthy habit, rather than a luxury. In launching this new brand position and identity, endota is now fully embracing and representing our belief that the experience of wellbeing is our natural state, and we want to encourage Australians to take a moment to nourish and nurture themselves and make the pursuit of wellbeing a way of life to feel free within their own skin.”

Says Elizabeth Wilmott, creative director at Bastion Creative: “With this brief endota handed me the ultimate gift – trust. endota wanted to represent wellness, and their brand, in a brave new way, and so did we. Their faith gave me the idea to gift that same trust to the photographers we selected. To strip away all the trappings and encumbrances of a typical shoot, leaving only artist and muse, to see what that might reveal. And we couldn’t be more thrilled. By allowing intimacy and removing expectation, the shots feel more truthful somehow. And more relatable to consumers who are tired of seeing retouched ideals of beauty.”

Bastion engaged renowned fashion and beauty photographers Stephen Ward, Nicole Bentley and Jennifer Stenglein on an unconventional brief to bring the new positioning to life.

(Photographer: Jennifer Stenglein)

(Photographer: Stephen Ward)

(Photographer: Nicole Bentley)

Aiming to counter the idea of stereotypical representations of ‘beauty’ and make it more accessible to all individuals, endota worked with these celebrated photographers to show the human side, flaws and all, of wellbeing.

The result is a beautiful, intimate, and raw campaign that contributes to a movement of encouraging people to recognise their own strength and feel empowered as they are.

Photographer Nicole Bentley said the invitation by endota to collaborate in the new campaign represented a huge leap of faith: “It’s the ultimate gesture of trust in you for a brand to say they have faith in you as a creator to deliver something that is going to be beautiful and ground-breaking.

“It felt like a gift to be given this brief and I was so inspired to see what I could create with it – it was on me to know when I had captured what was required, and it was important to me to have the time and space to create a real connection with the subjects because I knew this is what would translate to sincere imagery.”

Discussing how the campaign translates to the diverse range of products and experiences and a deep relationship of care the brand has with its customers across Australia and the globe every day, Gleeson says: “Wrinkles, scars, stretch marks, hair, smile lines – there is true magnificence in diversity and that is what we see every day across our network.”

The new campaign is currently live across radio, out-of-home, podcast advertising, paid social, search as well as owned assets including the endota website, CRM and across its more than 100 spa point-of-sale digital screens.

The new brand and visual identity will also be rolled out fully across endota’s Australian and New Zealand spa network signage and product packaging in the near future.

A behind-the-scenes making of documentary of the new endota campaign can be seen below:

endota
Chief Marketing Officer – Claire Austin
Senior Marketing Manager – Alana Adkins
Brand Manager – Hannah Taylor

Bastion
Creative Director: Elizabeth Wilmott
Copywriter: Elizabeth Dias
Senior Designer: Katrina Tesoriero
National Chief Strategy Officer: Angela Morris
Group Account Director: Sommer Hampson
Client Director, PR: Natalie Arnull
National Head of Production: Kaelene Morton
Senior producer: Niki Bentley
Print Producer: Darren Gibson
Editor: Paul Baguerra / Dave Wade
 
Collaborators/Photographers
Nicole Bentley
Stephen Ward
Jennifer Stenglein
Music: Sam Muir
 
Media Agency: Media Merchants
Justine Butler

Models
Bruna Lapinkas
Polina Sova
Gaia Orgeas
Ljubo Milicevic
Saria Elfrose White
Nyama Amum