Twin Redwoods Turns a $60 Instagram Ad Into $4,500 in Retreat Bookings With Solsten’s Elaris

The challenge

A solo founder, an unconventional product, and three seats left to fill

Twin Redwoods had grown primarily through word of mouth and organic social content. That was enough to launch its first experience, but not enough to reliably reach new customers. And as a solo founder building the company on the side, Devon had limited time to spend researching audiences, developing campaign concepts, and testing creative.

That became urgent heading into Relax & Rally. The six-seat, women-only retreat brought together two worlds that rarely appear together: rallycross driving and nervous-system regulation practices. Three women had committed, but the remaining seats had stalled. Without more bookings, cancellation was becoming a real possibility.

Paid advertising wasn’t an obvious answer. Twin Redwoods’ first campaign the year before had spent $120 across two ads at $0.23 per click and nearly converted one $2,850 applicant, who ultimately backed out. At the time, the young brand had no testimonials, established social presence, or real event photography to work with.

A year later, Twin Redwoods had those assets. What it still didn’t have was a marketing team. The challenge was turning what the business had learned about its customers into compelling advertising quickly, without taking time away from designing and delivering the experiences themselves.

The solution

Audience intelligence first, human craft at the finish

Rather than start another campaign from a blank page, Devon used the three confirmed participants as a starting point for understanding the broader audience.

In Elaris, she began with the Millennials → Social Networker persona and a Brand Book generated from the Twin Redwoods website. Elaris surfaced motivations, messaging, and visual themes likely to resonate with women considering an unusual proposition: a weekend combining nervous-system regulation and performance driving.

From those insights, Elaris developed three creative directions. One stood out: “Push. Reset. Repeat.”

From audience insight to creative direction

The concept captured a tension at the heart of Twin Redwoods: pushing yourself and recovering well aren’t opposites. They’re skills that can reinforce each other.

Devon brought the concept into ChatGPT to quickly visualize a potential campaign. The first result was promising, but repeated edits to details like dates and location degraded the image. It also presented a bigger problem: the final creative unmistakably looked AI-generated.

That mattered. Twin Redwoods participants had already expressed fatigue with AI-generated content, and authenticity was especially important for an experience asking women to spend a weekend with people they hadn’t met before.

“No matter how much prompting I did, I couldn’t get the AI version back to looking clean. My participants have told me directly they’re fatigued by AI content, so I rebuilt it by hand using real photos from the previous event.”

— Devon Wyland, Founder, Twin Redwoods

Elaris informed the direction. Human craft brought it to life.

The AI-generated image became a reference rather than a finished asset. Devon rebuilt the campaign in Figma using photography from a previous Twin Redwoods experience and refined the messaging with what early applicants had said mattered most: confidence and self-trust, stronger driving skills, a relaxing weekend away, and connection with like-minded women.

Elaris had done the work that was hardest for a time-constrained solo founder: providing an audience-informed starting point and creative directions without requiring hours of upfront research and ideation. Devon could then spend her time applying the judgment and craft that mattered most to the brand.

The finished Reel was published on Instagram and boosted to an audience similar to Twin Redwoods’ existing followers.

The outcome

A $60 test, $4,500 in bookings, and a model to repeat

The clearest result was revenue. Within two weeks, $60 in ad spend generated $4,500 in confirmed retreat bookings, a 75x return on ad spend. Five women applied, enough to take Relax & Rally off the cancellation list. Two confirmed for October, while another put down a deposit for the February cohort before its dates had even been announced.

Underneath the bookings were signs of broader demand. The campaign drove 462 unique website visits at $0.13 per click, nearly half the $0.23 cost per click of Twin Redwoods’ previous paid campaign. It also generated 12 new Instagram followers and 15 comments, opening new conversations with women interested in the experience.

Three additional applicants who couldn’t attend in October joined the waitlist for future retreats. Photographers, coaches, and other professionals also reached out independently about co-creating future experiences.

A year earlier, Twin Redwoods had spent twice as much on a paid campaign that nearly converted one applicant but ultimately produced no booking. This time, authentic event photography, direct insight from early participants, and audience-informed creative direction through Elaris turned a small experiment into immediate revenue and a marketing approach worth repeating.

Twin Redwoods is now applying the same Elaris → human creative workflow to future cohorts, awareness campaigns, and early messaging tests for new experiences: letting Elaris accelerate the research and ideation so the founder can spend more time crafting the experiences themselves.

“Elaris takes a lot of the thinking out of advertising, so I can get campaigns out faster and spend more of my time crafting the experiences themselves.”

— Devon Wyland, Founder, Twin Redwoods