Kim Sung-joo’s career in Korea started off with a big disadvantage: an X chromosome
KIM SUNG-JOO LIKES TO repeat a story often told by her mother. When she and Kim’s father, Daesung Group founder Kim Soo-keun, took a trip to New York and Paris, her father began acting unusually. He was deferential, holding the door open for his wife, getting her chair at restaurants – in other words, treating Kim’s mother the way Western men would. “He never did that,” Kim recalls. But as soon as her parents’ flight touched down in Tokyo on the way back to Seoul, that all changed. “He went from ‘ladies first’ to ‘ladies last,’” Kim says.
Kim’s greatest crisis was being born an ambitious woman in a culture in which “ladies last” is the norm. Kim, 51, was expected to attend college to heighten her matrimonial qualifications and allow matchmakers to arrange a marriage that merged her family with another Korean family of suitable means and rank. Instead, she attended Amherst College, the London School of Economics and Harvard University – all against her father’s will. It was at Harvard in 1985 that she did “something worse than murder” in the eyes of her traditional father: she fell in love with a Canadian and announced her plans to marry him.
Kim’s family disowned her. “They went down and took my name out of the family registry,” she says, leaving her both without a family and the means to support herself in the US.
In fact, adversity sowed the seeds of her future success. Kim is CEO and chairman of the Sungjoo Group, which brought Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Marks & Spencer to South Korea. In 2005, Sungjoo purchased German handbag and accessories maker MCM, which distributes to more than 150 retailers in 30 countries. Last year, Sungjoo Group had US$200 million in revenue. Along the way, Kim has become a darling of the Korean and international business press as an iconoclastic female entrepreneur in the male-dominated business world of South Korea, which is the subject of her 2000 book, I Want to be a Beautiful Outcast. Along the way, she has survived divorce, a near fatal accident involving her daughter, the death of employees in the collapse of a Seoul department store in 1995 and losing $30 million overnight in 1998 during the Asian financial crisis.
Now she is expanding her line of luxury stores in Europe and North America – in one of the greatest global financial crises in the last 100 years.
The former theology student credits her Christian faith for helping her plow through each roadblock. “I have failed in my marriage, I’ve failed in my [school] exams, I’ve failed in my business,” she says. “I just know this is part of God’s training in my life, and I know it will make me a stronger person.” Kim starts each day on her knees in prayer. She says her faith is anchored in the Calvinist belief that earning money “can be the result of diligence, as long as it’s gotten honestly, and you invest in the economy and help society.” Kim donates 10 percent of her profits to charity. “I believe in ‘creation capitalism’ – what’s important is how you pursue it, how you utilize it, and how you return it.
“The most important thing is mental attitude whenever I face trouble,” she says. “If you despair, then you are a failure.”
Kim entered the fashion industry shortly after her family disowned her. She took a job at Bloomingdales, learning the luxury goods market that would eventually become the core business of the Sungjoo Group.
But the venture was nearly stillborn. Four months after starting her company in 1990, Kim was dining with potential clients in a restaurant. Her infant daughter, Jeehae, wandered into the kitchen and grabbed the power cord of coffeepot, bringing boiling water down on top of her. A quarter of her body received third degree burns; doctors said she wouldn’t survive.
Kim was wracked with guilt. Had she stayed at home like a traditional Korean housewife, this never would have happened. If her daughter survived, she thought to herself, she would quit her company and devote her life to her daughter. But a friend pointed out that working and devotion to her daughter were not mutually exclusive. So she did both, staying by her daughter’s hospital bedside for four months while launching Sungjoo Group. (Her daughter recovered, and is planning to go to college in the US.)
Her company grew through the early 1990s, and then troubles began. In 1995, three of her employees were killed along with 500 other people in the collapse of Seoul’s Sampoong Department Store, the biggest peacetime disaster in South Korea’s history. Kim went to the site to help find their remains.
By 1998, she had nearly 100 stores around South Korea and exclusive franchise deals with Gucci, Marks & Spencer and MCM when the Asian financial crisis hit. She closed nearly a quarter of her stores and sold her lucrative Gucci franchise back to the company.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose $30 million like that,” Kim says. “Selling Gucci back, that was very hard – we had the sixth largest market for Gucci worldwide. To just sell off one of your most profitable businesses was emotionally hard, but it made the most business sense for the situation. You just sit down, have a cool mentality and move very decisively without looking back,”
As the Asian financial crisis deepened, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, named Kim one of the “1997 Global Leaders of Tomorrow.” Being thrust into the international spotlight gave her more media attention at home, where she spoke openly of the shabby treatment of women in Korea. “Fundamentally,” Kim said, “the nation is using only half its brain power.”
“The funny thing was, until the Asian financial crisis hit, I was quiet, just busily raising my daughter and building my business,” she says. “After Davos, I couldn’t hide myself.”
Ultimately, Kim was reconciled with her hardheaded father. An American auto parts maker wanted to do business with the Daesung Group and asked her to mediate. When the negotiations on a $200 million joint venture almost fell apart, Kim righted them. To thank her, Kim’s father lent her the seed money for Sungjoo – with interest. She was returned to the family registry, although the father left all his businesses to his sons.
Shortly before he died, Kim’s father told her she had inherited his talent for business, more so than her brothers. And then he said: “I wish you had been a boy.”
