Shinsegae supports int'l expansion of S.Korea's promising fashion brands

South Korea's Shinsegae Department Store has launched activities to support the overseas expansion of up-and-coming domestic fashion brands.

The company will hold offline export consultations for such brands jointly with the government-run Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) and launch next month the online export-only platform K-Fashion 82.

Shinsegae from Wednesday to Thursday ran an exhibition hall for product display and export consultations for domestic apparel brands at the 2023 Boom Up Korea Export Consultation at the Seoul COEX under KOTRA supervision. The six participating brands included Kimoui (unisex), Tripleroot (women) and Vlack Veast (denim), all of which were launched under three years ago, and Daily Mirror (women).

Tripleroot CEO Lee Ji-sun, whose brand opened a pop-up store or temporary sales booth at Shinsegae in 2021 that led to its full-scale business launch, said, "The opportunity to easily meet buyers was a tremendous help in expanding our markets to Europe and other countries."

From the event's opening day, the booths there were flooded with buyers from Japan, China and the Middle East. One entrepreneur who has a select fashion store in the Harajuku area of Tokyo said, "We're actively mulling official imports because these are trendy brands with good cost-effectiveness that target people in their 20s and 30s."

Shinsegae and KOTRA will hold export consultations for new brands in Frankfurt, Germany, in June and Bangkok, Thailand, in October.

Slated for launch late next month is K-Fashion 82, an export-only business-to-business online platform and the first of its kind launched by a domestic department store chain for new and small and medium fashion businesses. Forty brands have applied for entry.

Shinsegae provides interest-free loans of up to 100 million won ($77,000) per company with internal reserves and subsidizes production costs of 10 million to 20 million won per export case. The commission paid by a participating brand is 3%-5% of sales.

A Shinsegae source said, "Our goal is to break 100 billion won in sales within five years."

Write to Hun-Hyoung Ha at hhh@hankyung.com