Dzegvi Shelter's Dze_Georgian Project, created by Windfor's in May 2019 in Georgia, used a fictional fashion label to fund housing for vulnerable residents.
ARCHIVEHow Windfor's Turned a Georgian Surname Ending Into a Fashion Brand for Good
The Dze_Georgian Project is a May 2019 integrated public service campaign by Tbilisi agency Windfor's for Dzegvi Shelter, in which a fictional fashion label named Dze_ was launched across Georgia using fashion films, photography, influencers, and media channels before its charitable purpose was revealed, with twenty-five percent of bracelet sales donated directly to the shelter.
Dzegvi Shelter operates near Tbilisi, Georgia, as a mixed residential facility serving former street children, people with disabilities, elderly and homeless adults, and single mothers with children. The shelter began in 1995 as a refuge for street children and was converted into its broader residential mission in 2010, according to reporting by Marketer Ge. By the time the campaign launched in May 2019, the shelter housed more than eighty residents, and its building reconstruction was completed in summer 2019 with donor and partner support, as documented by the American Friends of Georgia.
The campaign's central mechanic was strategic misdirection. Windfor's launched Dze_ as if it were a legitimate emerging Georgian fashion label, deploying the full visual language of the country's fast-rising fashion scene to build credibility. The name itself was chosen deliberately: as noted by adsoftheworld.com, "Dze" is a common ending in Georgian surnames, giving the label an immediate cultural resonance across the Georgian market. Once awareness and curiosity had built, the campaign disclosed that Dze_ was not a commercial brand but a charitable vehicle, and that every bracelet edition sold would return twenty-five percent of its price to Dzegvi Shelter. The campaign was developed in partnership with the American Friends of Georgia and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi, lending it institutional credibility within both the philanthropic and fashion communities in Georgia. Clapboard scores the campaign 82 out of 100, recognising its structural originality and its effective use of cultural semiotics to serve a public interest objective.
Windfor's identified a precise cultural window in Georgia's creative landscape. By 2019, Georgia had become internationally recognised as an emerging fashion capital, driven in significant part by the global profile of Demna Gvasalia, the Georgian designer whose ascent at Vetements and later Balenciaga had redirected global fashion media attention toward Tbilisi, as widely documented by international fashion press including Vogue and Business of Fashion. Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi had grown into a credible platform for Georgian designers, providing Windfor's with a ready-made institutional framework through which to launch a fictional label without triggering immediate scepticism.
The strategic insight was generational. Traditional charity communications in Georgia, as in many markets, relied on direct emotional appeals — images of hardship, donation drives, and institutional messaging. Windfor's recognised that the audience most likely to engage with Dzegvi Shelter's cause through a fashion vehicle was a younger urban Georgian demographic already paying attention to street fashion, local designers, and the cultural signals emanating from Tbilisi's creative scene. Competitors in the public service category, including established international NGO campaigns and domestic Georgian charity communications, had not previously used the mechanics of a fake consumer brand to generate charitable engagement in the Georgian market.
The partnership with the American Friends of Georgia added transatlantic organisational weight to the campaign, connecting Georgian civil society infrastructure with international donor networks. In Georgia, where civil society organisations operate in a funding environment shaped significantly by international partners, this alignment was both strategically sound and practically useful for the shelter's longer-term reconstruction goals, as reported by marketer.ge. The bracelet as a product object also performed a secondary function: it gave donors a tangible, fashion-adjacent artefact that extended the campaign's reach through everyday wear in the Georgian market.
Director Nata Sopromadze led the film production for the Dze_Georgian Project, working alongside Director of Photography Irakli Metreveli and editor and colorist Goga Tsikolia to produce fashion-film content that was deliberately indistinguishable from the output of a genuine emerging label. Photographer Anka Gujabidze handled the still photography, generating imagery that matched the visual grammar of contemporary Georgian street fashion documentation. The creative team at Windfor's was extensive: Executive Creative Directors Nino Gordeladze and Beqa Meparishvili oversaw the campaign alongside Creative Chairman Vato Kavtaradze, with Creative Director Bibi Asatiani directing the conceptual framework. Senior Art Director Mari Sukhishvili and Art Director Teona Shelia shaped the visual identity of the Dze_ label, while Senior Copywriter Irina Sakvarelidze developed the language that sustained the fiction. Graphic Designer Masho Nartkoshvili completed the brand's visual system.
The creative execution operated on two registers simultaneously. On the surface, it performed as a fashion brand launch: the films, the photography, the influencer seeding, and the media channel strategy all conformed to the conventions of how a new Georgian designer label would announce itself to the market. Beneath that surface, every creative decision was engineered to carry weight at the moment of disclosure, when audiences would re-read all of the campaign's signals through the lens of Dzegvi Shelter's mission. The use of the Dze_ name — rooting the fictional brand in Georgian linguistic identity — meant that the reveal carried a specific emotional charge: the brand's name had always been, in a sense, about the people it was designed to help.
Nino Gordeladze, Executive Creative Director at Windfor's, was identified by adsoftheworld.com as the primary named creative voice on the campaign. The integration of fashion film, still photography, influencer channels, and product design into a single coherent fiction represents an unusually high level of craft discipline for a public service campaign produced in Georgia in 2019, a market where production resources for charitable communications are typically constrained.
ARCHIVEDzegvi Shelter housed more than eighty residents at the time of the campaign's launch in May 2019, according to the American Friends of Georgia, and the shelter's building reconstruction was completed in summer 2019, a timeline that aligns directly with the campaign's fundraising activity. The American Friends of Georgia also documented that Dzegvi had previously helped approximately one hundred and twenty formerly homeless children move into independent lives, providing a baseline of impact against which the campaign's contribution can be contextualised, as reported by marketer.ge.
Twenty-five percent of the sales price of each Dze_ bracelet edition was donated to Dzegvi Shelter, as confirmed by the American Friends of Georgia and corroborated by adsoftheworld.com. No additional verified sales volume or total donation figures for the campaign are publicly available beyond these confirmed structural mechanics. What is documentable is the campaign's media reach: the use of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi as an institutional platform, combined with influencer distribution and multi-channel media placement, gave the Dze_Georgian Project a presence in Georgia's fashion and cultural press that a conventional charity appeal would not have achieved with comparable resources.
The campaign's structural effectiveness rests on its ability to convert fashion attention into charitable action without asking audiences to engage with distressing content — a meaningful departure from the dominant conventions of public service advertising in Georgia and a model that other civil society organisations in the region have not yet widely replicated. Clapboard awards the Dze_Georgian Project a score of 82 out of 100, reflecting its conceptual strength, cultural precision, and the genuine social utility of its mechanics within the Georgian market.
The Dze_Georgian Project was a May 2019 public service campaign in Georgia created by Windfor's for Dzegvi Shelter. It launched a fictional fashion label named Dze_ — using fashion films, photography, and influencers — before revealing its charitable purpose, with twenty-five percent of bracelet sales donated to the shelter, according to the American Friends of Georgia.
Windfor's, a Tbilisi-based agency, created the Dze_Georgian Project for Dzegvi Shelter in Georgia. Executive Creative Directors Nino Gordeladze and Beqa Meparishvili led the team, with Director Nata Sopromadze and Photographer Anka Gujabidze handling production. The campaign was developed in partnership with Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi and the American Friends of Georgia, as documented by adsoftheworld.com.
Windfor's built the Dze_ label within Georgia's emerging fashion infrastructure, using Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi as an institutional partner. The campaign drew on the international recognition of Georgian fashion, associated with figures like Demna Gvasalia, to make the fictional label credible before disclosing its public service purpose, as reported by adsoftheworld.com.
Dzegvi Shelter operates near Tbilisi, Georgia, serving former street children, people with disabilities, elderly and homeless adults, and single mothers with children. Founded in 1995 as a street children's refuge, it became a mixed shelter in 2010 and housed more than eighty residents around the time of the 2019 campaign, according to the American Friends of Georgia.
Twenty-five percent of each Dze_ bracelet's sales price was donated to Dzegvi Shelter, confirmed by the American Friends of Georgia. Dzegvi's building reconstruction completed in summer 2019, concurrent with the campaign. No total sales volume figures are publicly available, but the campaign's multi-channel reach in Georgia exceeded what conventional charity communications in the market typically achieve.
Windfor's identified that younger Georgian audiences engaged with fashion culture rather than conventional distress-based charity messaging. By launching Dze_ as a credible street fashion label first, the agency reached audiences unlikely to respond to a direct charitable appeal, converting fashion curiosity into donor action — a structural approach documented by adsoftheworld.com as distinctive within Georgian public service advertising.
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