Accelerating cross-border luxury shopping 🇰🇷 🇫🇷
A luxury bridge between Korea and Europe in the post COVID-19 era...
Meet Incubateur HEC Paris incubee Somi Park, Founder and CEO of the Seoul based startup London Friday.
Let's start at the beginning: could you briefly introduce yourself and explain to us the origin of your startup London Friday ?
London Friday started as a small e-commerce business giving access to European designers’ and luxury brands’ products within the online platform called Naver, the biggest portal website in Korea. The idea was to give access to European luxury brands to Korean customers at a more affordable price. To do so we had the idea to found a first to market online shopping tax-refund system.
Today we plan not only to provide tax-refund service to the Korean customers (and Asian customers in the near future) but also to create a borderless online shopping environment for international shoppers.
VAT refund has always been an extraordinary incentive for international shoppers, and the idea to create a solution that adapts to global shopping is a very strong value proposition. Could you tell us more about the ideation process behind the project?
Due to the continental price differentiation policy, some brands set up higher local price compared to the price in Europe; and Korea is often subject to the higher local price. Therefore, Korean customers have high interests in buying the expensive products at cheaper price. Customers, therefore, buy products on European online websites and ship it to local freight forwarder in order to take the advantage of more affordable price points in Europe. After that, they finally ship the goods to their final address in Korea from the freight forwarder.
In this process, customers happen to pay the local European VAT which takes up to 19% to 22% of the product price. Customers are eligible to receive the VAT refund because they are exporting the products to non-EU country, however, the process is very heavy and often abandoned.
London Friday figured that it is much easier for a corporation to claim VAT refund for customers, so here we are, getting ready to launch the tax-refund service to Korean customers. Now, we’re only planning to open the service to Korea but we’re definitely planning to expand our service to whole Asia.
You joined Incubateur HEC Paris at a critical moment, during the pandemic , could you let us know if and how this unprecedented situation impacted your startup?
Yes, COVID19 has changed a lot of things and it certainly affected London Friday as well. Due to the pandemic, the conversion of offline to online has tremendously accelerated. When we look at the growth of online market in Korea, the luxury e-commerce has grown up a lot for last one year. London Friday has also seen a strong e-commerce growth, attracting not only the 'travelers - shoppers' who were not able to go to Europe, but also converting Korean offline shoppers to online. Despite the complexity of the global situation, we see an opportunity for London Friday to expand our tax-refund business along with the online shopping business.
How does the Incubateur HEC Paris program help you and what would be your 3 tips to other international startups to make the most of it?
I’m one of the “lucky few” startups to be selected to join the Incubateur HEC Paris program thanks to the Korean Institute of Startup & Entrepreneurship Development, also known as KISED. KISED aims to contribute to the development of the national economy through the growth of startup businesses , job opportunities and the promotion of the technology based startups. More so they have developed strong cross-boarders relationships the startups can benefit from. This is how I joined the incubator in 2020.
It’s just so amazing to have such an intense and complementary business program on the other side of the world. The Incubateur HEC Paris’ program managers, experts, advisors and startups founders are always willing to support, listen to your ideas and concerns while providing practical solutions both on the strategic and operations sides.
For the international startups, I want to say…:
Be specific what you need and want from the program
Tap into the largest possible community of Incubateur HEC Paris' experts
Bother them for what you need (!) and you get it.
I'd like to invite all French and European startups to contact me if you’re interested in the Korean market. Just like I’ve been receiving such a strong support from HEC Paris community, I’d be very pleased to be one of your supporters to help you to develop your business in Korea.
Before you leave, could you share with us your vision of the future of shopping ?
There is no doubt that the unprecedented crisis has accelerated what was already obvious being the future of retail. Whereas COVID-19 forced traditional retailers to both accelerate their e-commerce but also to rethink how to attract their local shoppers, it also created opportunities to create bridges for global shoppers, beyond travel. My ambition is to make London Friday the reference in providing a global shopping solution between Europe and Asia.
Thank you Somi, we are glad to have you onboard!