I Love Ugly is a New Zealand menswear label, 17 years in market. It built its name on counter-culture design and premium construction, and now sells clothing, activewear, jewellery and accessories across New Zealand, Australia and the United States. The brand voice is confident, design-led and deliberately uncommon, and a loyal customer base has followed it for most of those 17 years. At home, the brand does a lot of the selling before anyone reaches the site.
I Love Ugly wanted to know why Australian and United States visitors weren't converting at New Zealand rates. The product was strong, the pricing was right, and the social following was substantial in all three markets. The gap sat somewhere in the experience, and the team wanted it identified precisely enough to act on rather than described in general terms. The ask was a diagnosis and a sequenced plan, not a redesign.
New Zealand was carrying the brand. Years of familiarity meant local visitors arrived already convinced, and the site never had to work hard. Australian and United States visitors arrived cold, and checkout completion in both markets sat well behind NZ. Nothing was broken in the conventional sense, which is the harder version of this problem: no error to fix, no page to repair, just an experience built for people who already knew the brand. Isolating what a first-time international visitor needed meant separating brand familiarity from site performance.
We used New Zealand as the benchmark. Same site, same products, same pricing, so any difference in behaviour in Australia and the United States pointed at context rather than merchandising. Our Creative & UX/UI team ran GA4 funnel analysis across all three markets to find where sessions were breaking down, then Microsoft Clarity heatmaps and click data across the homepage, listing pages, product pages, navigation, cart and checkout to see how people behaved once they were there. Structured usability testing supplied the language customers used. Every finding was then mapped back against the New Zealand baseline.
We audited the I Love Ugly experience in November 2025 and delivered a deck covering six themes: product imagery and video, navigation and category discovery, bundles, fit confidence and sizing, brand story and trust, and loyalty. Every finding was tied to GA4 or Microsoft Clarity data and paired with a specific recommendation.
The sharpest sat on the product page. Heatmaps showed the image gallery was the most interacted-with element, with users cycling through angles before reading a line of copy, while the imagery itself showed garments as static objects. The video I Love Ugly was already producing for social had never made it to the site. Navigation told a similar story: one Shop tab holding Bestsellers and New Arrivals, users falling back on breadcrumbs to reorient, and Activewear, Jewellery and Accessories left buried. The deck closed with a six-month implementation roadmap sequenced by page, impact and effort.
