Hyundai Home Shopping projects to boost exclusive brands

Hyundai Home Shopping’s headquarters located in Gangdong-gu, Seoul. (Hyundai Home Shopping)

South Korea’s home shopping industry is turning to exclusive brand development as a strategy to increase profitability and attract customers after experiencing its worst performance in 2023.

To expand their offerings of products that are available “exclusively through us” home shopping companies are empowering employees with greater autonomy and investing heavily in strengthening proprietary content. Exclusive brands act as unique content available solely from the company, leading to significant customer inflow and higher profit margins.

According to the retail industry on Sunday, Hyundai Home Shopping has fully launched a company-wide project called “Overseas Business Search” since July 2024 to exclusively acquire overseas products that are yet to be introduced in Korea. The project requires employees form teams to directly research foreign companies and pursue exclusive contracts through business trips, a strategy that reflects a special directive from top management, including CEO Han Kwang-young.

The company recruited project teams through its internal intranet two months ago, with around 20 teams applying. After evaluating the appropriateness and feasibility of their proposals, five teams were selected as final candidates in August 2024 and these teams will conduct business meetings with overseas companies until November.

The selected teams have chosen destinations including France, Australia, Japan, and the United States. In France, they plan to negotiate with well-known living brands; in Australia, with food brands dealing in nuts and grains; and in Japan, with renowned fabric companies. The teams will also receive support from a task force providing necessary sales support and legal advice when promoting domestic business in the future.

A Hyundai Home Shopping official described the project as “unconditional support.” “Our goal is to sign new domestic license agreements with 10 global brands by the end of 2024,” the official said, adding, “Our employees are putting all their efforts into finding brands and products that have not been introduced in Korea yet.”

The top management is pouring all its resources into fostering exclusive brands to boost profitability amid sluggish market conditions. Thanks to these efforts, Hyundai Home Shopping recorded sales of 570.9 billion won ($427.3 million) in the first half of 2024, up about 8 percent compared to the same period during the previous year. During the same period, operating profit rose 62 percent on-year to 41.9 billion won.

Hyundai Home Shopping currently operates 13 exclusive brands, including Gobi, J BY, and Mothan.