42Below had already built a reputation for doing things differently — irreverent, distinctly New Zealand, and allergic to anything that felt like a standard liquor campaign. When the global marketing team started thinking about how to promote the Fat Boy range in travel retail, the brief was simple: make it unforgettable.

What we built was a custom augmented reality point-of-sale unit — a one-of-a-kind fibreglass display kiosk with a HD screen, webcam, and embedded computer. Pick up a bottle of 42Below, hold it in front of the screen, and you’re transported into an animated world built around that flavour. Tilt the bottle, the world tilts. Move closer, it zooms in. Each flavour had its own environment, voiceover, and cocktail recipe.

The 42Below Fat Boy AR kiosk in a Liquorland store, showing the webcam screen with 'Hold the bottle up to the screen' prompt, surrounded by 42Below bottles

The brief

Fat Boy was the stand itself — a one-of-a-kind promotional display unit designed to stop travellers in their tracks at travel retail. The challenge with point-of-sale marketing at duty free is catching people before they walk past. AR was emerging in 2010 as something genuinely novel, and that novelty was the draw.

The idea that emerged was to use the 42Below bottle as the trigger. Hold it up to the kiosk screen and the webcam recognises the label, using it as an AR anchor point to pull the customer into a world specific to that flavour. The kiosk ran at Auckland International Airport — a high-traffic, high-expectation environment where the experience had to work without any instructions at all.

How it worked

The technical stack would look primitive now, but was genuinely cutting-edge for 2010. The core relied on marker-based AR — the camera identifies a printed pattern embedded in the label design and uses it as an anchor to overlay 3D content. Getting that right required solving several problems simultaneously:

  • A label design that embedded a functional AR marker without looking like it was designed for a functional AR marker
  • A Flash-based rendering engine (the only realistic option for real-time 3D at the time)
  • 3D animated environments that worked at the low polygon counts webcam-fed AR required
  • Physical kiosk hardware — the fibreglass unit, HD screen, webcam, and embedded computer — that could survive an airport retail environment
  • The interaction model: tilt, zoom, move — all triggered by the bottle’s position relative to the camera

The flavour worlds

Each of the four 42Below flavours had a distinct visual world — built around the character of the flavour, not just its taste. Feijoa went lush and tropical, with native New Zealand wildlife. Kiwi went pastoral, with rolling green hills and distinctly NZ iconography. Passion went warm and coastal. Pure vodka went arctic, cold, and otherworldly.

42Below Feijoa flavour world — bottle surrounded by waterfalls, native wildlife, and a panda in a lush tropical landscape
42Below Kiwi flavour world — bottle in rolling green New Zealand hills with a kea, Māori carvings, sheep, and a vintage biplane
42Below Passion flavour world — bottle on a tropical beach at sunset with flamingos, scarlet birds, and a sailing boat
42Below Vodka world — bottle in an arctic landscape with a yeti, polar bears, penguins, and an astronaut against a star-filled sky
42Below Honey flavour world — bottle in a golden field of sunflowers and beehives, with a beekeeper, a bear wearing a gold chain, a squirrel, and hot air balloons against mountain backdrop

What we learned

Several things went wrong, and several things worked better than expected:

  1. Lighting killed the experience more reliably than any bug. AR marker detection in 2010 was extremely sensitive to ambient light. A kiosk that worked perfectly in the morning could fail entirely by afternoon as the sun moved across the terminal.
  2. The AR marker had to survive printing tolerances. What looks perfect on screen can drift enough in print to confuse the detector. We went through multiple label iterations before we had something robust enough for a retail run.
  3. People needed prompting — but not much. Once someone saw another person do it, they wanted to try immediately. The social proof loop in a busy airport was instant and powerful.
  4. The tilt and zoom interaction was discovered by users without instruction. That was the best outcome — a physical metaphor so intuitive that people found it themselves.

What I owned

  • Client-side coordination across creative agencies, technical suppliers, and logistics partners
  • Stakeholder management and internal communications throughout the build
  • Design and delivery of all print and physical collateral, including the flavour-specific neck tags that carried the AR markers
  • End-to-end logistics from production through to deployment at Auckland International Airport