By 2009, 42Below had already built a reputation for doing things differently. The brand was irreverent, distinctly New Zealand, and allergic to anything that felt like a standard liquor marketing campaign. When the global marketing team started thinking about how to promote Fat Boy — the oversized, novelty 1.75-litre bottle — the brief was simple: make it unforgettable.
What we built was an augmented reality point-of-sale experience. At the time, AR was not a product category with established tools, SDKs, or agencies specialising in it. We were working largely from first principles, figuring out what was technically possible and what would actually work in a retail environment.
The brief
Fat Boy was a promotional format — a giant bottle, sold in liquor stores across New Zealand and eventually internationally. The challenge with point-of-sale marketing for a novelty product is that the product itself is the spectacle, but only once someone picks it up. We needed something that could draw people in before they’d committed to picking up a two-kilogram vodka bottle.
The idea that emerged was to use the bottle itself as a trigger. If you held the bottle up to a webcam — at a kiosk in-store, or later via a web experience at home — it would recognise the label and overlay a digital character on top of it.
"The bottle was the remote control. That was the insight that made everything else make sense."
How it worked
The technical stack we used would look primitive now, but it was genuinely cutting-edge for the time. The core of the experience relied on marker-based AR — a technique where the camera identifies a printed pattern (the AR marker, embedded in the label design) and uses it as an anchor point to overlay 3D content.
The components we had to get right:
- A label design that embedded a functional AR marker without looking like a label designed for a functional AR marker
- A Flash-based web experience (this was 2009 — Flash was still the only realistic option for in-browser 3D rendering)
- A 3D animated character that worked at the low polygon counts that webcam-fed AR required
- A physical kiosk solution for in-store, where we couldn’t rely on customers having their own hardware
- A home web experience that anyone with a bottle and a webcam could access
What we learned
Several things went wrong, and several things worked better than expected. Here’s the honest version:
- Lighting killed the experience more reliably than any bug. AR marker detection in 2009 was extremely sensitive to ambient light conditions. A kiosk that worked perfectly in the morning could fail entirely by afternoon as the sun moved.
- The label AR marker had to survive printing tolerances. What looks perfect on screen can drift enough in print to confuse the detector. We went through four label iterations before we had something robust.
- People needed prompting — but not much. Once someone saw another person do it, they wanted to try immediately. The social proof loop was instant and powerful.
- The home web experience drove more engagement than the in-store kiosk, because people shared it. We hadn’t fully anticipated how much of the value would come from people doing it at home and sending the link to friends.
Why it still matters
I’m not telling this story because AR point-of-sale is a novel idea in 2026 — it isn’t, and there are now entire agencies and platforms built around it. I’m telling it because the process of building something genuinely new, without a reference case or an established vendor, shaped how I think about product work.
When there’s no playbook, you have to be unusually clear about what you’re trying to achieve, because you can’t borrow someone else’s definition of done. The brief — make it unforgettable — was the only stable anchor we had. Every technical decision ran through that filter.
That instinct, to hold onto the user outcome when everything else is uncertain, is something I’ve carried into every product role since.