About Forever 21
Forever 21 is a fashion industry leader making the latest trends accessible to all while inspiring unique style and confidence. With a renewed focus on the customer experience, the brand offers high style designs and fashion basics with compelling values and a dynamic store environment.
Client Location
Los Angeles, CA
Campaign platform
Instagram, TikTok
The big question
How Does a Fashion Retailer Ensure its Athletic Line is a Slam Dunk?
The background
Finding the Right Fit
Forever 21 tapped BENlabs to launch its Los Angeles Lakers collection with a bang. Working with athlete influencers would seem an obvious move but Forever 21 didn’t want to give the impression that the line was just for athletes. They also wanted to make sure the Forever 21 Lakers gear didn’t seem out of reach for its target customer’s budget.
Together, BENlabs and Forever 21 once again proved that thoughtful fashion brand integration drives measurable, predictable, repeatable results.
The AI
AI Models for Predictable Success
With BENlabs AI driving audience cluster analysis and smart matching the brand with the perfect content creators to share its new Lakers line, Forever 21 was set up for success.
Audience Cluster Analysis
Forever 21, like the Los Angeles Lakers, appeals to a diverse demographic. For the campaign to be successful, BENlabs AI needed to identify audiences beyond the obvious age, income, and area. BENlabs AI identified the perfect audience clusters at the intersection of sports fandom and fashion. These audiences were perfectly primed to learn about the new Los Angeles Lakers collection from Forever 21.
Smart Creator Matching
With the most receptive audience clusters identified, all that remained was to find the content creators that matched Forever 21 Brand values and that had influence with the diverse audiences. BENlabs AI surfaced multiple content creators, ultimately refining the list to the 15 most influential voices for the campaign.
The Creative
A Fit that Fits
Though Forever 21 executes its own internal influencer marketing programs, BENlabs’s unique relationships with creators within this specific athletics-meets-apparel niche made the partnership a clear opportunity for Forever 21 to better reach its target audience. The goal of the collaboration? To show customers how influencers worked the clothes into their everyday style and drive purchases.
The clothing company asked BENlabs to coordinate the creation of 10 pieces of creator content. To make it happen, BENlabs AI identified influencers within Forever 21’s diverse demographic that lived in the LA area, so that they could capture the LA energy around the Lakers. Creators were free to style the apparel according to their own personal preferences.
Out of the gate, the campaign was running on a tight schedule — the collection had to be shipped to influencers before they could create content, leading to some complex logistics.
To ensure success, BENlabs tapped creators in its extensive network that had already proven themselves reliable and nimble. With a solid foundation in place, BENlabs was free to bring in new talent as well, introducing important diversity across creators for the campaign.
One such new creator turned out to be an incredible performer in the campaign; a former Lakers dancer whose experience with the team gave her unique credibility in the context of the Lakers collection campaign.
This creator loved the fit so much that even a month after the campaign ended, her Instagram profile photo remained an image of her sporting Forever 21 Lakers apparel.
THE RESULTS
It’s a Slam Dunk
With all the pieces in place, BENlabs tapped 15 paid influencers across Instagram and TikTok — platforms where Forever 21 customers are most likely to engage with the content.
Creators were inspired to share 28 pieces of organic content, almost tripling the guaranteed 10 pieces of content for the campaign, far exceeding the brand’s expectations. Organic posts drove over 245K views across Instagram and TikTok, with over 127K engagement. Organic posts drove over 1,800 clicks to the Forever 21 Los Angeles Lakers collection.
In addition, BENlabs ran a powerful paid campaign with three sponsored posts driving an over 470% return on investment (ROI) as directly attributed purchase revenue for Forever 21. Sponsored posts garnered over 2.4 million impressions across Instagram stories and TikTok videos driving 4,151+ clicks and 2,632+ purchases
The takeaway
Finding Your Fashion Fit
The Forever 21 Los Angeles Lakers collection crosses demographics; there is no one target customer. That’s not unusual; marketers will often have an ideal target audience in mind but the truth is, it’s rarely that simple.
By trusting BENlabs AI to hone in on the right audiences, crossing sports fandom and fashion, Forever 21 achieved massive success, and the Los Angeles Lakers collection got the attention it deserved, from audiences primed to buy.
In another example of BENlabs AI driving data-led campaigns, a TV streaming service thought it knew who its ideal customer was and spent a lot of time and money targeting that persona. With deep audience intelligence, driven by BENlabs AI, the company found new, more receptive audiences in unexpected clusters, driving unprecedented influencer success for Philo.
