How co-creation cut Forty-Love’s cost-per-click by 64.7%
The Challenge
Forty-Love is a new, premium Australian racquet wear brand, blending functional performance with timeless design. But with launch still months away, the founder faced a challenge familiar to every emerging brand: how do you build buzz and engage your community before you even have stock to sell?
Traditional pre-launch tactics like social content, teaser campaigns, giveaways and paid ads can only take you so far, and Forty-Love wanted to do something different. They wanted their audience to help shape the brand from the very beginning.
The co-creation play
Together with Zipline, Forty-Love invited their Instagram community to design their own tennis dresses through AI-powered co-creation.
The idea was simple: give people the tools to just create and see what happens. Within the first 24 hours, more than 400 unique designs had been submitted. By day five, that number had climbed to 2,000. And by the 19 the day, the community had produced over 3,500 distinct tennis dress designs - each in seconds.
How it worked
What made this campaign so powerful was how simple it was for Forty-Love’s community to create. No complicated prompts, no AI expertise required, just an idea, a few words or even a vibe.
Because the AI was meticulously trained on Forty-Love’s own aesthetic, every design stayed true to the brand. One of the most popular prompts was as simple as “yellow flowers spring vibes.” It didn’t even mention “dress,” yet the AI instantly produced tennis dresses that looked like they belonged in the collection. Guardrails ensured the output reflected Forty-Love’s design language, visual codes and campaign intent - that’s how Forty-Love gave fans the freedom to play while keeping the results unmistakably on-brand.
The results
For Forty-Love, co-creation delivered measurable outcomes across brand, audience and acquisition:
3,500 unique dresses created in 19 days → a groundswell of creativity and proof of demand.
17% increase in email sign-ups → growing a first-party channel before launch.
12% increase in Instagram followers → organic reach as the creations were shared.
64.7% drop in cost-per-click → cheaper acquisition compared with traditional paid social.
Hundreds of campaign-ready assets → instantly generated, on-brand content at no extra cost.
