Vibram: You Are The Technology

Providence-based Nail Communications (Nail), recently hired CoolFire Media to bring a new website to life for Nail’s client, Vibram FiveFingers. The site www.youarethetechnology.com has some new ideas and approaches to web design that we hope the technology, advertising and running communities will find interesting.

What if everything we’ve been told about running for the last 30+ years was wrong? What if we’ve been sold tens of billions of dollars of technology that never actually helped us as runners and might even have hurt us? What if a small shoe company asked an ad agency to come up with an idea sharp enough to puncture this enormous myth? And what if they didn’t want to spend a penny on media to do it?

This is exactly what happened when Vibram hired Nail Communications to introduce their new minimalist running shoe, the FiveFingers Bikila. With the goal of creating a web site that told the story of natural running in a way that was so unusual and beautiful that it spread itself.

Nail hired CoolFire Media to help with production and spent six months concepting and creating: The idea was to illustrate the folly of believing that 30 years of lab work could ever deliver a design or performance that took 2 million years of evolution. And that the best running technology available is in fact available to everyone. It just needs to be unleashed. From naked models, to original tattoo work, to a website that is literally built onto the human body and a sound track with no instruments, there are many communication innovations to be experienced and enjoyed. All while learning about the power of the human foot and the future of natural running. Users can also control and review how the FiveFingers Bikila performs on different running surfaces.