Jet - The Great Stigma Clearnance

Black women have a lower incidence of breast cancer, but in Africa, due to a lack of education on how to detect the early signs, their mortality rate is much higher.

Jet, a fashion retailer with over 500 stores across Africa wanted to use its footprint and social media to reach black women to help save lives. Breast self-examinations are the most effective and affordable way to detect early breast cancer and prevent death, but how do we teach African women how to self-examine when breasts and nipples are censored on social media?

We needed a way to create a conversation with black women around breast cancer that would allow for open and honest dialogue

We wanted to educate black South African women about breast cancer. One of the most accessible means for lower-income women to get information is via social media. Together with that, there are many social stigmas associated with the disease, so showcasing influential women helped us dispel fear and myths while making the lifesaving educational information about early detection available, relevant and accessible. All campaign collateral was created with a mobile-first experience in mind and took into account various data limitations women in South Africa face in order to ensure the information was able to cross the digital divide.

The BreastLace

Life-saving information was simply not reaching African women on a personal and relatable level. The solution was to create real, bare-breasted self-check tutorials featuring black women. But showing bare breasts, even for educational purposes is banned across all social networks.

In Africa, traditional gatherings and cultural practices celebrate bare breasts. That’s why social networks do allow breasts and nipples to be shown when women are wearing traditional necklaces.

Introducing The BreastLace. A traditional necklace that allowed us to make the first, bare-breasted, self-check video tutorials for African women, by African women and share them across all major social networks.

We created sharable, social media videos which are warm, down-to-earth and reassuring instead of cold, clinical and frightening - just real women with real breasts, talking without shame

See the retail film here.