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Korean startups

Home decoration app O!House launches a beta version in Japan

In the latest Series D round, Bucketplace raised $177 million. It opened a local office in Japan, hiring content managers

By Aug 11, 2022 (Gmt+09:00)

3 Min read

A promotional image of O!House featuring South Korean singer Im Yoon-ah
A promotional image of O!House featuring South Korean singer Im Yoon-ah


“Even though different countries have varying living conditions, we all share the common goal of decorating our spaces,” Jay Lee, CEO of Bucketplace Co. said on Wednesday in an interview with The Korea Economic Daily. 

The startup, which dubs itself a lifestyle tech company, recently released a beta version of its home community service O!House in Japanese. 

The service encompasses an online open house function, which shows detailed photos of well-decorated homes, with links to where the furniture pieces in the photos can be purchased. 

“From the space perspective, the world is already well-connected,” said Lee. “Monstera was widely popular in South Korea as an indoor plant and that was the case in other countries around the same time.” 

Lee founded Bucketplace, the operator of O!House in 2014, and the app grew to become one of the best-known lifestyle tech platforms in South Korea. 

In the latest Series D round, Bucketplace raised 230 billion won ($177 million). 

As a later-stage startup, Bucketplace will use the fresh injection of capital to expand into new markets, such as Japan, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

Its corporate value hovers around two trillion won ($1.5 billion).

The figure is higher than the combined corporate value of two of the biggest offline interior companies, namely Hanssem Co. and Hyundai Livart Furniture. 

Hanssem boasts a market capitalization of 1.27 trillion won and Hyundai around 230 million won. 

The Korean version of the app boasts 5.07 million monthly active users (MAU) as of June, 30 times that of Hanssem’s online mall. 

After dominating the domestic market, O!House has turned to the overseas market for its growth engine. 

Bucketplace opened a local office in Japan and began the hiring process for a content manager in the Japanese language. 

“I saw a non-Korean user uploading content in English on the original O!House app and that prompted me to think that the app could take off abroad as well,” Lee said. “We will try out the service launch in several countries to finetune our overseas strategy.”

What made O!House famous is not professional pieces of advice but the virtual open house in which everyday users could participate. 

The users themselves post what they’d like to show about their homes, showing off the hard-earned aesthetics. 

It became a hit with the synergy effect between those who would like to share their interior design tastes and those that’d like to see how other people decorate their houses. 

Lee explained that even though there were some professional advice functions involving interior designers at first, what was the most popular was sharing how everyday people decorate their actual homes. 

LG Electronics has items on O!House, such as the Object Collection VR Showroom 
LG Electronics has items on O!House, such as the Object Collection VR Showroom 


In 2016, the company adopted what it calls a content-to-commerce function to the content, meaning users could click on specific items shown on the online open house postings to make purchases. 

“When we first introduced the content-to-commerce revenue model, investors were skeptical as this was such a novel concept,” recalled Lee. 

Fast forward to 2022, the app sells a piece of furniture every seven seconds during the busy season with monthly revenue of 180 billion won, according to the co-founder.

The sales model of linking content to commerce really took off during the stay-at-home measures amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The annual revenue surged from 7.2 billion won in 2018 to 117.6 billion won last year. 

O!House is also the fourth most commonly used shopping app in South Korea.

Two years ago, the company secured its own logistics network; and added construction brokerage and moving services to its platform. 

Bucketplace is also bullish on M&As, such as the acquisition of home renovation company My Zibda and Singapore-based online furniture shopping platform HipVan.

“O!House will become a space where people from all over the world can share their different tastes in life and inspire each other,” Lee said. 

Write to Eun-Yi Ko at koko@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.
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