Ugly, weird and selling fast: China’s unconventional consumer craze

Another award winner that year, known as Master Lu, created deliberately unconventional ornaments based on the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. 

Traffic to his Taobao store jumped 306 per cent month-on-month after the win. 

The phenomenon is now large enough to be measured in more than memes and social-media shares. 

Taobao says products featured under its Uglies initiative have generated 230 million yuan in sales since the awards began, reaching tens of millions of young consumers. 

CAN UGLINESS BE MANUFACTURED? 

Once something becomes commercially successful, businesses inevitably want to reproduce the formula. 

But the harder brands try to manufacture eccentricity, the more they risk losing the spontaneity that made it appealing in the first place, say experts. 

Hu believes the best examples tend to emerge naturally rather than from a corporate instruction to design something absurd. 

“Ugliness can be accidental. It can happen naturally. If you deliberately pursue ugliness, the result can feel overly contrived. It may attract attention for a while, but in the long run consumers may not actually like it,” Hu said. 

“That is part of what makes Niu Lai the movie interesting. It may be rough, but it wasn’t deliberately made that way.” 

Zhang concurs but holds a slightly different view. 

“It can be designed, but it’s also socially constructed,” she said.  

“A lot of ugly things are born from internet memes. So, on that part, I don’t think it’s something you design (but) you do need to take inspirations from people’s everyday lives, which is socially constructed collectively as a society.”