A Unique Look for Discerning Customers

Valentin Ozich had to do a little exploration before he struck the right creative chord. Back in 2008, the illustration collective he founded in Auckland, New Zealand, came up with the I Love Ugly brand, which first applied to a concept for a magazine and a t-shirt design business.

Finally, the quirky, catchy name found its place in the world and exploded. I Love Ugly went from local start-up to international success story in a matter of a few years, offering men a selection of pants, shorts, t-shirts, outerwear, accessories, and even cologne to customers in every major market.

“The goal is to be the best premium lifestyle streetwear brand in the world,” explains
Gordon Grant, CFO for I Love Ugly. “The mission is to inspire our customers to achieve their aspirations. It’s for the quite discerning person who wants to be different, not mainstream.

“It is all about being creative, innovative,” Grant continues. “Valentin wants something that’s slightly different out there that makes people say ‘Hey, I’ve got I Love Ugly on.’”

Perfected Channels

I Love Ugly’s growth arose from a careful strategy to cultivate brand awareness through select online and retail channels. The company shuns the concept of saturation in favor of a strategy that maintains brand mystique to preserve the unique quality of its design.

“People that buy our products don’t want to see them as mass market products, but rather as quite niche,” Grant says. “The supply chain directly reflects that business model.”

I Love Ugly today reaches customers through geographic market-focused ecommerce websites using Magento. It runs two flagship retail locations in its home country and wholesales through independent, premium streetwear and footwear retailers in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

It also makes heavy use of social media platforms, particularly Instagram and Facebook. It’s a natural fit for an apparel brand sharply focused on offering one-of-a-kind design selections. As Grant describes it, the strategy calls for discrete and subtle brand control.

“We keep it quite tight,” Grant says.

Behind the Scenes

If I Love Ugly’s marketing strategy is to maintain tight control of its brand, it also keeps its supply chain tight. The company uses a limited number of factories in China to produce its entire range of clothes and imports the finished goods to a single warehouse in Auckland, from where it dispatches its B2B and B2C orders.

“Everything comes out of there and we send by courier around the world,” says Grant.

The supply chain, then, was as discreet as its marketing strategy. But when Grant joined I Love Ugly in 2016, he realized inventory management needed improvement.

“We were dealing with a very old, dated system that needed updating,” he says. “It was very hard to get good quality information on time to make good decisions.”

To begin with, while the company had grown into a multi-million dollar international business, it still tracked inventory using spreadsheets, which not only involved a lot of manual data entry but made it difficult to extract information to maintain the right stock levels.

“It meant we were ordering blind from our factories and we weren’t matching those orders to what we were selling, at times,” Grant says.

This led to occasional overstock in the warehouse and inconsistent stocking of particular color-size combinations. Grant says this insufficient transparency across the business led to a discernible drag on cash flow.