Ugly Drinks is on a mission to deliver zero-sugar, zero-calorie, flavored seltzer waters directly to its consumers while also donating to important charitable causes along the way.
Ugly Drinks is creating a new, healthier future for the massive soft drinks industry, challenging giants like The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo and Red Bull head on. Hugh Thomas and Joe Benn founded the brand based on two major assumptions:
- Soft drinks don’t have to be unhealthy
- A company’s marketing and advertising doesn’t have to promise the world
Yaguara connected with Ugly Drinks due to a few relationships with their founders, and we discovered we're both passionate about the future of eCommerce and the strategies leaders will use to stay at the forefront. We’ve since been working heavily with their Global Direct-To-Consumer & Brand Manager, Orla Weir, on further utilizing Yaguara to empower their team.
Orla Weir
Global Direct-To-Consumer & Brand Manager @ Ugly Drinks
The Next Phase of Growth
Ugly Drinks has had an interesting growth journey. What started as a popular alternative has caused a wide range of consumers to fall in love with the brand in both the UK and US.
With this increasing demand, Ugly Drinks had to find a way to scale their strategy and maximize efforts with very few resources, sooner rather than later.
"Yaguara integrates with every software in our tech stack and allows us to visually represent custom and key metrics for our business all in one place."
Life before Yaguara
After starting the company in the UK in 2016, Ugly Drinks entered the US market in 2018. This meant a disparate team five time zones apart. The team was looking for automated visualizations of real-time metrics across the entire business UK & US DTC to create time efficiency for the Ugly Drinks team.
The team was looking for a data aggregation and visualization tool to analyze key metrics across both businesses to help catalyze decision-making. Their difficulty was finding a tool that would provide comparative insight of both markets in a clear and visual way.
In the past Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and company activities were held in a variety of places:
Klaviyo
Google Analytics
Facebook Ads
In that conversation, we discussed how Ugly is investing in infrastructure; the hiring of agencies/employees to manage direct business needs. The conversation centered around laying the foundation for tracking and measuring activities that the brand is doing and will be doing in the future.
How Yaguara helped Ugly Drinks
When we asked Orla what specifically Yaguara helps Ugly Drinks with, she shared three main things:
1 — Time
“Yaguara integrates with every software in our tech stack and allows us to visually represent custom and key metrics for our business all in one place - saving the time we spent manually pulling this together previously.”
2 — Key Metrics Tracking
“Yaguara has helped us analyze trends over time more effectively with real time series visualizations of our metrics over time - for example our CPC, CvR, CTR and CPMs on paid social. This has helped with key decision making on what changes we need to make to achieve our goals more quickly.”
3 — Team Alignment
“Being able to use the platform with the wider team has made it much easier to keep everyone updated and focused on the same goals.”
Solution
Ugly Drinks used Yaguara to build a universal platform to enable business-wide data visualization, goal setting, and insight creation. Rather than reinventing the wheel for each launch or quarterly goal set, they built a repeatable OKR system in Yaguara.
Orla and company also took advantage of Yaguara's Dashboards functionality to quickly understand metrics, rather than spending that time manually maintaining them.
Ugly Drinks broke down their goals into three parts:
Increase Revenue for US/UK DTC businesses
Ugly Drinks’ top OKR is to increase top-line revenue across both the US & UK DTC channels. This is their north star.
Increase Traffic by 220%
Traffic is a leading indicator for Revenue. Without traffic, revenue won’t follow. We must focus on this to increase revenue.
Set Benchmarks for limited edition flavors
Ugly Drinks drops limited edition flavors, so setting up a dashboard to compare their performance to each other over time is critical.
Adoption and Results
Their team had tried different approaches to setting goals with data in the past, and they either fell off or required too much manual work.
Yaguara became the headquarters for all operations and data management for Ugly Drinks. As the company continued their work to create the industry’s new favorite drink line, Orla and her teams rely on Yaguara for aggregated, transparent data to help them make faster business decisions to accelerate their impressive growth.
“Yaguara’s implementation process is a lot easier than you’d think. You can get your data connected in seconds, and start working on goals and key metrics ASAP.
Meanwhile knowing that my teams can easily access everything - projections, OKRs, insights - in one connected platform has been a game-changer.”
Key Takeaways
1 — Ugly Drinks is now closer to their analytics that help increase retention of their current customer base, drive traffic to the Ugly site to increase acquisition, and to help grow our community-facing programs.
2 — Their team was finding it challenging to balance out the time spent reporting versus executing. Yaguara has given them the time, efficiency, and tool to sync as a team, which are both key items needed for growth.
3 — Yaguara’s usability meant employees needed little to no training to get started, saving time and energy for the operating team.
4 — Customizable goals and dashboards for different departments allow for transparency and focus across the company.
Yaguara ❤️ Ugly
We’re fans of Ugly Drinks’ sparkling water, the brand, and the team. Our customer strategy team loves having them as clients to partner with on their data needs. We’ve helped them define their OKRs for the rest of the year. And together we are starting to explore cohort analysis; In particular, we’re looking at how their subscribers vs non-subscribers behave in their lifetime to uncover insights on what the Ugly Drinks team can do to find more of the Ugly Mob!
