How Cole Haan Produced a High-Converting Brand Video in 30 Minutes With a Budget of Just $15 — Proving AI's Real Commercial Impact
WaveSpeedAI brings Cole Haan a more grounded yet highly imaginative new way of working.
— Yangbo Zhao, General Manager, Cole Haan Greater China
In Cole Haan's Shanghai office, content creation used to be a race against time. For fast-paced ecommerce platforms like Douyin and Taobao, the team needed large volumes of visual assets—daily. High content refresh rates, constant A/B testing, and rapidly evolving platform algorithms made traditional production methods far too slow and too costly.
After weeks of research, Video Manager Tiankai Bao began integrating WaveSpeedAI's video-generation platform into the team's creative process. Just six months later, he's gone from early adopter to power user. What once required days can now be produced in minutes.
He puts it plainly:
A 20-second brand video used to cost at least $7,000 and a full day of shooting. With AI, it now takes 30 minutes and less than $15.
And when it comes to e-commerce short-form videos—such as model showcases or scripted voiceovers—the difference is even more dramatic. Traditionally, producing a single short clip costs several dollars. Now, Tiankai Bao's team can generate two or three AI versions within minutes, achieving high-performing assets with 70% lower cost and 2x faster output.
The ROI improvement is visible almost instantly.
From Tool to Capability: How AI Became a Standard Marketing Workflow at Cole Haan
For Tiankai Bao, who now fully understands and utilizes WaveSpeedAI's suite of tools, AI is no longer an experiment—it is a brand marketing productivity engine.
His daily workflow looks like this:
1. High-Quality Product Images With Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro
Using WaveSpeedAI's Nano Banana model, the team produces product visuals that are detailed, high-texture, structurally accurate, and fully aligned with Cole Haan's brand aesthetic.
In addition, after the launch of Nano Banana Pro, the team immediately began using the updated model and reported a noticeable improvement in visual realism.
2. High-Fidelity Motion Videos With Veo 3.1 Fast
The Veo model generates dynamic product videos that preserve fine details and even support "screenshot-to-search" behavior on Douyin and Taobao—allowing viewers to instantly find the product page with one tap.
This combination forms their AI Content Pipeline, used daily for large-scale content production.
Tiankai Bao also developed his own technique: the "Card-Pull Strategy"—generate in bulk, select the best. With experience tuning prompts and model preferences, he now achieves a 50% usable-asset success rate, significantly higher than industry norms.
This kind of human-AI co-creation is quickly becoming the new standard for e-commerce content teams.