Hi there, and welcome to the brand new Ugly Christmas Party blog! I’m Sarah, the Chief Operations Officer here at UCP. It’s a fancy title for sure, and one I got the good, old-fashioned, American way… I married the boss. In addition to managing logistics at our offices and warehouse, I’ll also be curating your blog and social media experience. I love feedback, so feel free to leave a comment below with any questions or suggestions for what you’d like to see in the future.

Since this is the first blog post, I think I’ll start with a brief history of Ugly Christmas Party. We have to start all the way back in 2011, when Tyler (my husband) started a little company called WedgeNix out of his bedroom, with $500 and a couple of plastic totes. Although he primarily sold action sports apparel, he had an opportunity to start selling ugly Christmas sweaters as well. He dipped his toe in at first, and purchased 500 sweaters. They all sold out - fast. So the next year, he bought a few more. The same with the year after that, and the year after that. What could have been a passing fad turned into a tradition, and eventually, Tyler was selling more ugly Christmas sweaters in the 45 days of the holiday season than the rest of his merchandise was selling year round. 

But the problem was, nobody knew WedgeNix. It wasn’t a recognizable brand - hell, it wasn’t even a recognizable word. For the record: it’s pronounced wedge - like potato wedge - nix, not wed-GEN-ix, like everyone (including Alexa) thinks. So in 2017, Tyler and his partner Dave launched Ugly Christmas Party, and decided to dedicate the majority of their year to sweaters that only sell in November and December. In 2018, we sold over 20,000 sweaters - a new record - and this year, we’ve got double that amount lined up to go. We’re betting big on Christmas, creativity, and our customer’s sense of humor.

2019 will hopefully go down in the history books as a banner year for UCP. We will still have the same great styles you’ve loved for the last few years - including our Reindeer Hoodie, ever the top seller, but we’ve also got several new and exciting initiatives coming at you, including this blog, a website redesign, and a slew of surprises that I don’t want to spoil just yet. Your girl needs content for future blog posts!

So why should you care about our little sweater company? Well, first and most importantly, we have a great product. We're also fun, creative, silly, and we don't take ourselves too seriously. Plus, we love Christmas so much, we get to focus on it 12 months out of the year, and everything seems better at Christmastime. Finally, we're also a small, family business, and we work hard every day to deliver the best to our customers. 

That's all for now! I hope you learned a little bit about Ugly Christmas Party. We can't wait to show you what we have up our stocking. 

 

Have yourself a very Ugly Christmas,

Sarah