Less than 1% of recorded history is about women. We built a living archive to start changing that.
Services —
Branding
Campaign
Communications
Motion Graphics
Strategy
Industries —
Arts & Culture
The MECCA Archive is a living digital timeline of Australian women’s cultural history, beginning in the 1900s and expanding each year with a new chapter.
Our creative agency partnered with MECCA’s M-Power initiative to produce it from the ground up: developing the archival framework, leading research and writing across more than a century of history, sourcing visuals and permissions, and delivering the digital platform alongside a multi-channel campaign that invited community participation.
The archive asks a few core questions that sit at the heart of the work:
How do we preserve culture through beauty?
Whose voices have been missed?
And what might this open up, for the stories still to be told?
Platforming the perspectives history overlooked —
The archive needed to do more than document. It had to hold space for every perspective, especially the ones still missing, while remaining rigorous, credible and ready to grow.
That meant building accountability into the process from the start, not as a box to tick, but as the thing that would determine whether the archive could be trusted, and trusted to last.
Keeping the archive accountable —
To truly reflect beauty as culture and to include diverse perspectives across Australia’s history, accountability had to come before content. We built a cultural framework to guide every stage of the process: research, writing and curation.
Drawing on feminist archival theory, decolonial practice and the work of scholars including Dr. Diana Taylor, Dr. Ann Cvetkovich and Dr. Kate Eichhorn, the framework gave the archive its principles and made sure those principles were lived in every decision, not just the introduction.
Diverse perspectives from brands, authors, and creatives around the world shaped a foundation for the archive to grow with care and context.
Elle —
Brand Strategist
An archive built to grow, evolve and endure —
Archival framework & collection
Designing the framework, leading research and shaping the collection across 125 years of Australian cultural history.
Research & writing
Researching, writing and fact-checking entries, while actively reviewing representation across the archive for gaps and bias.
Visuals & copyright
Sourcing 400+ images to support each story, alongside a rigorous copyright and permissions process.
Campaign activation
Working with MECCA’s M-Power team to deliver a month-long, multi-channel campaign across social, web and in-store.
Community contributions
Managing community engagement and new contributions as the archive continues to grow each year.
Now that we know where the gaps are, the real work begins to fill them and write women back into history.
Lauren —
Strategy Director
Impact
1 —
125
years across Australian history have been researched.
2 —
400+
images sourced to support stories, where possible.
