Made with Bravery Puts Ukrainian Brands at the Heart of Rebuilding

Why the Brick Metaphor Resonated Across the Ukrainian FMCG Market in Wartime

Banda Agency built the Made with Bravery campaign on a single, load-bearing idea: buying Ukrainian products is an act of physical reconstruction. Oleksiy Dyvysenko, creative director at Banda, used the brick metaphor explicitly to explain how consumer spending could translate into material support for a country under bombardment, as documented by clapboard.com. The metaphor did not require explanation — it was immediate and tactile, which made it equally legible to a Ukrainian diaspora audience and to international consumers with no prior connection to the country.

The strategic context mattered. In 2022, Ukrainian FMCG brands faced existential disruption to their domestic distribution networks and their international visibility. The global FMCG sector that year saw unit-value sales increase by approximately eight percent, driven primarily by inflation, according to Market Worldpanelbynumerator — but for Ukrainian producers, the challenge was not pricing but presence. Made with Bravery gave those brands a single, credible export channel backed by government ministries and an internationally recognised payments partner in Visa.

Competitors in the cross-border Ukrainian goods space — including individual brand-operated Shopify stores and broader Eastern European e-commerce aggregators — lacked the institutional endorsement and the emotional architecture that Made with Bravery carried. The UNITED24 donation mechanism, confirmed by u24.gov.ua, transformed each transaction from a commercial act into a documented contribution to national recovery. That conversion — from purchase to brick — is what separated this marketplace from any existing alternative in the Ukrainian market and made the campaign's communication strategy structurally difficult to replicate.

Inside the Stop-Motion Craft That Brought Ukrainian Products to Life on Screen

And Action approached the Made with Bravery brief as a hands-on, literal creative problem. The studio's core idea, as documented by clapboard.com, was to build a world using actual Ukrainian consumer goods — packaging, tins, bottles, and boxes — as the physical building materials for an animated city. The technique chosen was stop-motion combined with cel animation, a labour-intensive process that meant every frame required physical arrangement of real products on set.

The production was directed by Ivan Ishchenko, with Victoria Suprun serving as producer, per clapboard.com. Stop-motion animation was executed by Roman Dzvonkovskyi and Danya Maliuha, who were brought in specifically for their expertise in that discipline. Set design was handled by Daryna Horielova, and cel animation was contributed by Olya Barabakh, with additional team members across a crew that Victoria Suprun described as twenty people on the And Action side alone, as quoted on clapboard.com.

Before winning the tender, the studio shot an animatic inside their own office to demonstrate their vision — showing how goods would move, how the main character would be animated, and what the completed city would look like. That proof-of-concept discipline was central to their pitch. The final production compressed filming across one week at two locations, with all action set above a skyline that the products themselves were constructing.

The combination of stop-motion and animation gave the film a tactile warmth that purely digital production could not have achieved. The goods were not props representing Ukrainian brands — they were the literal architecture of the film's world, making the campaign's central metaphor visible in every frame. Suprun stated directly, as quoted by clapboard.com, that the team was unanimously satisfied with the result — an uncommon declaration in a production culture that habitually finds room for one more edit.

Six Million Views and a Presidential Platform: Measuring the Made with Bravery Impact

Made with Bravery reached six million views, a figure documented by clapboard.com and attributable in large part to the video being shared on Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Instagram page — one of the highest-profile distribution channels available in the Ukrainian communications landscape in 2022. For a campaign operating without a traditional paid media budget of comparable scale, that organic amplification represented a structural achievement as significant as the creative execution itself.

The marketplace launched on September 13, 2022, according to kmu.gov.ua, with institutional backing from Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Visa, and the UNITED24 Rebuild Ukraine fund. The five percent per-purchase donation mechanism, confirmed by u24.gov.ua, gave the campaign a measurable humanitarian output tied directly to commercial volume — meaning every view that converted to a purchase generated a documented reconstruction contribution.

No independent third-party audit of total marketplace sales volume or total donations transferred to UNITED24 is publicly available at the time of writing. What is verifiable is the distribution scale, the institutional partnership structure, and the production outcome. Twenty production staff from And Action alone contributed to the film, as reported by clapboard.com, and the finished work delivered both a thirty-six-second campaign film and two ten-second cutdowns within a one-week filming window. For a wartime production in Ukraine in 2022, that output under those conditions represents a logistical and creative result worth examining independently of view counts.