Written by Lauren Sherman
"BoF Entrepreneurship Week" opened, the first article for you to report on the Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster, detailing how the brand used creative methods to develop, refusing to become a copycat version of Warby Parker.
SEOUL, South Korea — In 2011, brands imitating Warby Parker were rife with brands that operated like Warby, advertised like Warby, and marketed like Warby. They also imitated the controversial emerging brand's model of confronting consumers and buying one for one for glasses, borrowing a lot of "borrowing" its visual characteristics in an attempt to get a piece of the eyewear market that Warby Parker was trying to break into and disrupt.
Many of these brands are open outside the U.S., where Warby Parker is located. A number of companies still operate today, including Mercy Would in Germany, Franchi Nobel in Indonesia, and Bailey Nelson in Australia. In 2012, a year after Warby Parker was founded, Bailey Nelson was founded and exported to Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Hankook Kim, founder and CEO of Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster, also thought about replicating Warby Parker's success. In 2011, Hankook Kim also ran an English-language training organization, Camp Korea. Jae W Oh, an entrepreneur at the same institution, appreciates him. "He said, 'Take some money out and I'll help you invest, how about that?'" Kim recalls, "When I first started looking at the eyewear industry and starting to do market research, I found that the industry was tightly controlled by unions and people wouldn't explore it as an art form. ”
He certainly discovered Warby Parker as well. "The brand is really getting bigger. At that time, every company introduced new ideas, offering customers simple and convenient services like free auditions and free returns," he said. ”
Gentle Monster's Sculptor glasses | Image source: Provided by the other party
Despite borrowing from Warby Parker's experience with customer service, Kim quickly realized that his Gentle Monster must not stop at "copycat Warby Parker." Asian consumers have a completely different but unfulfilled desire than Western consumers: super, super-big glasses. "In Asia, praising others for their 'small faces' is the biggest compliment," Kim said, "and oversized glasses can show small faces, and there are not many competitors." "The large size of the mirror, coupled with a low nose pad that is compatible with the facial characteristics of Asians ("glasses always consider only the facial characteristics of Westerners"), means that the Asian glasses market has also matured and can meet another different "dark horse product".
With Oh's support, Kim soon discovered that Daegu, South Korea's fourth-largest city, had once been the manufacturing hub of eyewear giant Luxottica before manufacturing was transferred to China. "A lot of great people are still out there," he said. In 2012, with nearly $100,000 in funding, Kim bought a South Korean factory and a Chinese factory that specializes in making acetate frames, which are illegally produced in South Korea. "With a factory, you can make high-quality products at a cheaper price and control the shipment," he adds.
At the same time, Kim also began to develop the personality and aesthetic of the Gentle Monster. Designed to look closer to the Akene than to Warby Parker, it has a gold-etched frame about the thickness of a glass bottle and a cat's-eye titanium frame. Designs with a certain sense of strangeness start at $200 and more complex styles start at $500. The physical retail store experience is also unique. "I want my product to look like the exhibits," Kim said. The brand's business card has also become a concept in-store. For example, at the brand's 3-story flagship store near Hongdae in Seoul, the first floor space is named "Quantum Project" and the in-store installation changes every 25 days. The most recent "Daydream Oasis" is sculpted out of the pool in egg grid material, and the fan blows silver cloth to simulate rolling waves. Before that, it was "The Eater," where mechanical heads at the table were greedily eating plates of colorful pasta.
The artistic way of retailing won a lot of layout and design blog coverage for The Gentle Monster, but in the end, it was the star implant that gave the brand a golden quality guarantee, just in time for the newly emerging K-pop Korean pop culture to become a global phenomenon. (In July 2012, Psy posted the Gangnam Style video on YouTube that was viewed more than 2.6 billion times.) From 2013 to 2014, popular South Korean actress Jeon Ji-hyun also wore Gentle Monster glasses in the popular Korean drama "You from the Stars."
Gentle Monster almost exploded as quickly as Gangnam Style. The company had revenues of $40 million as of 2014 and was in both wholesale and direct retail operations, primarily in Korea and China. In 2015, that number has quadrupled to about $160 million. Gentle Monster, which is expected to generate revenue of about $250 million in 2016, currently has 10 direct-to-consumer retail stores: seven in South Korea, 1 in Beijing, 1 in Hong Kong, 1 in New York, and one store each in Shanghai and Los Angeles. 70% of the business is direct retail and 30% comes from wholesale partnerships.
Gentle Monster New York flagship store interior | Image source: Provided by the other party
The brand's upward prospects are strongly related to overseas expansion, and Gentle Monster is currently sold in more than 450 stores such as Harvey Nichols and Nordstrom. Kim quickly realized that the West was also eager to find a customer base with uniquely designed, low-nose pad glasses, and hired New York-based Korean brand consultant Won Lee as CEO of Gentle Monster USA. In February 2016, Gentle Monster opened its first boutique on Grand Street in New York's SoHo district. The store has a cave-like large, deep space of 500 square feet designed by sought-after architect Rafael de Cárdenas, but the brand used to design its storefronts more grandly, and it is. "We don't know much about U.S. construction laws and regulations," Lee says, "and it's relatively simple and easy in South Korea, and it's much cheaper." ”
Gentle Monster's next U.S. storefront, in Los Angeles, will open in downtown (DTLA) by the end of 2016 on a 11,000-square-foot footprint that is more stylistically aligned with a dream storefront in Asia. The brand is talking about locations around Miami and Dallas, with plans to open 10 new stores in the western United States and Europe by 2019.
Gentle Monster said that even if the store opens in the United States, the goal is still to attract "millennials" in Asia. "Students at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, NYU will be an important part of this consumer group," Lee said. But the long-term goal is undoubtedly to reach a wider audience.
This means that the brand focus is no longer on star implantation. Lee said getting Kendall Jenner or Gigi Hadid to wear Gentle Monster glasses on the streets didn't necessarily lead to sales boost: "Asian consumers are very influenced by celebrity dress, but in the U.S. I'm not sure. Kim said the brand strategy now is actually to ease The Gentle Monster's ties to K-pop, even in Asia. It's good to have these celebrities wear our glasses, but it's very problematic at the brand level," he said, "for example, now you look at our Instagram and you don't see too many celebrities." ”
Indeed, perhaps the momentum of The Fountain Monster in the U.S. or elsewhere will remain the unique sense of design that will make people stop seeing it as a "copycat brand" from the start. After all, everything else is beginning to be "commoditized on a daily basis." It's worth noting that Warby Parker is now also offering low nose pad products as well.
Perhaps judging by Kim's aggressive expansion moves, it's no surprise that his ambitions go far beyond glasses. "Gentle Monster started out making glasses, but the goal was to become a disruptive creative company," he says. ”
Discussion today
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