It was a Thursday night, and I was at a newly opened rooftop bar in the Lower East Side. Unopened, technically, as the official opening would be in an hour. Presently, it was still in the pre-open phase, a one-hour period that seemed indistinguishable from the opening phase, save for the open bar. I had been invited by a DJ whom I’d met at a wedding a week earlier and mildly hit it off with. It seemed a good chance to show my girlfriend, who was visiting the city for the first time, a glimpse of “New York nightlife,” a world not altogether familiar to me either.

I searched for the tall frame of a man who, at a circular table in the backyard of a Hudson Valley farmhouse the week prior, read my name off a card he had picked up from a table somewhere. I confirmed myself as the person he had been directed to sit with, and then realized I had never gotten a card myself. Had we entered through the wrong entrance? My girlfriend, seated next to me, seemed too preoccupied with the daze of ongoing discomfort to care about this in particular. It was her first American, Jewish, outdoor, hyper-progressive yet academically traditional garden-party wedding. It was mine, too.

“I’m a record collector, mostly,” he admitted almost sheepishly as he slumped into his seat and adjusted his jacket. I dipped a piece of roasted eggplant in hummus and chewed on it. “And I DJ occasionally.”

Unsurprisingly, the seating arrangement had been no accident. As we talked, I discovered that his career had been strikingly parallel to the one I had tacked together in Seoul—a day job in marketing, an alter ego in clubs and record bars on the weekends, a passion for digging and sharing music. “What do you play?” he asked at one point. As I explained that I had gravitated towards disco and garage house in the last few years, he began to smile. “Very similar. I’ll send you some edits.”

Upon exchanging Instagrams, I pieced together that he had done the refined thing of underselling his renown. Though not a headlining act, per se, he had tracked a solid tenure playing at New York’s most effortlessly chic venues, and rubbed elbows with some of the legends I admired most. His own edits, released through one or another of the city’s cooler labels, had gotten him flown out to Berlin regularly. Now, he was over it all. “I’m almost forty,” he had explained at the wedding. “I’m sober, and I aim for a 10:30 bedtime.” On this point, minus our ages and differing alcohol consumption habits, we were once again aligned.

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He looked as tired as I was at 9:15, when I found him behind the booth towards the back of the soon-to-be-opened bar. Nonetheless, he smiled over the decks, and reached his hand over to shake mine. “Thanks for coming,” he shouted lightly over a rumbling, sinister-sounding 1980s Miami-esque synth cover of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. He began to duck out of the booth to speak to us more, but seemed to rethink the decision as the song neared a break. I implored him to stay put. “My friends are over there,” he yelled as a consolation, gesturing towards the uncovered patio that jutted out from the narrow space over the Lower East Side. “Go meet them, they’re cool.”

Two men, one clean-cut and blonde in a New York preppy-tech zip-up, the other shorter, tan, with an impeccably styled mop of black hair, seemed to notice they were being directed towards us. I watched as they shifted in their seats on a low bench against the glass guardrail, bracing for social interaction.

I introduced myself, and my girlfriend introduced herself. The blonde one was from somewhere other than New York, somewhere much smaller, but had been here for ten years. The shorter, energetic one of the pair was from Tokyo, he explained as he bounced along eagerly to whatever was playing. They were both a little older than us, had good New York careers (blockchain and music licensing, respectively), and had gotten married the year prior. Our mutual DJ friend had featured on the reception lineup.

My girlfriend, who despite not being Japanese is substantially more comfortable in her faculty with the Japanese language than with English, naturally dropped into conversation with the Tokyo native. I spoke with the man who looked like a put-together, more traditionally accomplished version of myself, with slightly lighter hair.

“How is your girlfriend liking New York?” he asked at one point.

“She’s really been enjoying it. I think she didn’t have much of a frame of reference for it beyond Sex and the City.”

“Well,” he chuckled. “There are worse frames of reference.”

“I suppose. I just began watching it with her for the first time. Carrie. What a piece of work.”

“He says I’m a Carrie!” His husband broke off from the excited Japanese conversation to interject, just as excitedly.

“You are.”

“I am.” He laughed with an air of fake embarrassment. “I so am.”

“At first, I had trouble getting through the episodes,” I explained, intent on maintaining the flow of conversation but now also acutely aware of the triteness of discussing Sex and the City with a gay couple. I resolved to wrap this thread up as quickly as possible. “But then a friend of mine proffered his theory about it: that all the men they date represent neighborhoods or facets of New York itself. That New York is really the main character. And the main characters are just working with the flows of the city as they try to figure out who they are.” I, myself, was not convinced of this theory. But it added a level of depth to the series that I found made it more watchable, and made for decent conversation.

The blonde one chewed on this for a second. “I always liked Carrie,” he said brightly in a way that suggested he understood why someone wouldn’t like Carrie. “I mean, do any of us really know who we are?”

I paused, thinking of how to answer, and defaulted to a nod.

The pair peeled away to refresh their drinks. We bobbed around for an hour or two, occasionally taking advantage of the open bar, occasionally bumping back into the couple and slipping into more disjointed, light conversation. The question continued to rattle around in my mind: do any of us really know who we are?

Had I not left New York for an initially directionless, dopamine-fueled life in Seoul at 22, perhaps I too would have become an accomplished global DJ with disco edits pressed on records from the city’s hottest underground labels. Perhaps I would have found a longtime, lucrative career in music, traveling around Asia and Europe every month, living in an overpriced apartment in DUMBO. Perhaps I would have learned what the blockchain is, and taken an interest in it, and made money from that, spending my weekends at the hottest, newest venues in the hottest, perpetually refreshed city in the country, mixing and schmoozing and squeezing from that whatever comes of it.

I reflected on some variation of thoughts like these throughout the three weeks I spent in New York—that this, or something like it, was what I had left behind. My life choices had been unorthodox, so the situation I found myself in was understandably difficult to find reference or comparison for. It was rare that I found desirable, let alone enviable, the stable, apparently comfortable lives my New York friends had made for themselves in that time. Yet what I may have “missed” by leaving my home for another vibrant, culturally intense city would on occasion nag at me. It was when I was face-to-face with the sides of the city that Carrie and her cadre coveted—the glitzy, go-getting, name-dropping, money-spending sides—that I wondered who I would have been had I immersed myself in them, instead of forsaking them for their counterparts in Seoul.

I would have a fuller bank account balance, to be sure, and likely a more consistent-looking resume. But aside from myriad very colorful, very valuable experiences, a wide network of machers across Asia, and fluency in a second language, my life in a city on the other side of the world had yielded something I became acutely aware of as soon as I heard the question: “Do any of us really know who we are?” Because my immediate reaction—the one I stifled in that moment—was something along the lines of “well…yes?” I do know who I am. Did other people not?

In a Season 3 episode of Seinfeld (a sitcom that I, like probably most New Yorkers, find infinitely more watchable than Sex and the City), George temporarily takes over for an older gentleman who makes his living moving cars on alternate-side parking days. George bungles the job, predictably, and ends up in a parking stalemate with a similarly hot-headed driver. Sid, the older gentleman, returns to the scene to try and defuse the situation. When he shows up, the hot-headed driver explodes at him in a particularly New York-flavored moment of frustration: “Who are you!?” Sid replies coolly: “Never mind who I am. I know who I am. Do you know who you are?”

It’s one of the most latently cutting comebacks to grace television. A light retort, on the surface, that threatens upon further consideration to plunge its recipient into a spiral of psychoanalytical contemplation and doubt. Yet its power lies in the presumption that, in fact, most people probably do not know who they are. Could that presumption be correct? Could it be a coincidence that this fictitious exchange was set in the very same city where I was asked, much more gently, rhetorically, and vulnerably, if any of us know who we are?

Of course I know who I am, I thought as I swayed to Balearic house music with some variation of a Negroni I was happy not to have paid for. Maybe it was hubris, I thought. But is confidence in the fact that one knows oneself not a knowledge of self in and of…itself?

A decade of being an outsider, learning to speak and live and, to some extent, thrive in an environment completely alien from my own, had forced me to step outside of whatever shaky concept of my person I had initially held. I had already committed, maybe unknowingly, to living a life that I enjoyed and found fulfilling, rather than one that adhered to any expectations or respectable reasoning. I was in too deep. I had no other choice but to understand in full what I liked, what I wanted, how I desired to continue living, and in that vein, who I was. Each of those criteria would change over time, inevitably—keeping up with them as they did, rather than attempting to encase them in a static mould, would be the task.

I am often asked by friends, family, and family friends what I do, what I’m going to do, and what my plans are. And my answers, as vivid and promising as they sound in my head, turn into nebulous, uncertain conjectures when they leave my mouth—ones that tend to leave the listener nodding and smiling, with an often poorly hidden whiff of doubt. The truth is, I have no definite answer to any of them—I am not sure anyone really does, including the people who think they do. But in recent memory, the far more important question of who I am has never troubled me. Perhaps this existential question is what I missed out on most by not spending my twenties in New York.

Living in Seoul, I made a habit of procuring as many of my groceries as possible from my neighborhood’s traditional market, both as a matter of principle and one of quality. The fruit was sweeter, the vegetables crisper, and the meat more flavorful than what I could pick up at giant grocery chains, all while being invariably cheaper. One of the treasures of the market, which I proselytized endlessly about to my mega-mart-frequenting friends, was fresh sesame oil; a number of vendors dotted along the semi-covered stretch of rice, pork, kimchi, fried chicken, and tteok shops roasted sesame seeds in large, ancient machines, creating clouds of nutty aroma around their stalls before bringing the seeds into the back to press into fresh oil. Crates full of simple glass bottles, often still warm to the touch, were stacked in front, ordered by price — small signs explained which bottles were pressed with sesame seeds from China or India, the cheaper option, while domestic seeds commanded prices from 20,000 to 40,000 won a bottle.

Even when settling for the 10,000 won oils made with imported seeds, the depth and freshness was astounding. I was so taken with the complexity and warmth of these oils that I insisted on using them when developing what would become a longstanding signature cocktail at my bar, Hard Material: the Koriqueña. Dark rum, fat-washed with this market-fresh sesame oil, folded into an otherwise standard daiquiri augmented with a bit of banana liqueur. Immediately a crowd-pleaser, I credit the memorable balance of flavors to the irreplaceable nuances of the oil.

Then, returning to New York for a visit last month, I came across what seemed to be an old friend in new clothes: Sooki small-batch sesame oil. The $40 bottle looked right at home among the countless artisanal, craft products in the bougie Upper West Side grocery store I had ducked into to use a bathroom. Upon seeing the brand for the first time, I was struck by a number of seemingly contradictory thoughts. Mainly: this is absolutely genius, I can’t believe no one’s ever done it before! And, simultaneously: this would never, ever work in Korea — the country of origin of the product itself.

Sooki is a masterful example of CPG arbitrage through branding — adapting a traditional product for a new, international market, and pricing it accordingly. Yet it’s worth keeping in mind that, no matter how authentic the product itself may be, its refreshed branding and elevated positioning likely make it untenable in the market where it came from. In unpacking the strategy behind Sooki sesame oil, we can explore the realities and opportunities of international brand arbitrage.

What is Sooki?

Korean American siblings Joseph and Hannah Choi released Sooki small-batch sesame oil earlier this year, selling at farmers markets and then securing shelf space at local, artisanal grocers across the country. Their family already had a sesame oil production operation in Korea, but the two recognized that premium, “finishing” sesame oil was still an untapped category in the US. According to the “About” page on their website, they “tested different seed varieties, adjusted roasting temperatures, and refined every step, from cleaning and pressing to filtration” in an attempt to replicate that fresh-from-the-market taste.

Positioning & Timing

A couple of factors made the timing for a premium sesame oil like Sooki extremely opportune.

First, Americans are exhibiting an unprecedented curiosity and openness toward experimenting with recipes from around the world. Among those, East Asian recipes seem to hold an enduring point of fascination, and Korean-inspired recipes, specifically, have been the exotic darling of the fine food world for the last decade or so. Walking through New York, it was hard to pass a quick-service chain not touting a gochujang-sauced something or other, often various allusions to the most accessible of K-foods: fried chicken, bulgogi, Korean BBQ, etc. H-Marts abound where no H-Marts existed before; Americans line up for whatever treat is dominating the feeds of Korean social media accounts (recently, butter tteok).

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Yet while there’s a rapidly growing demographic of Americans with an interest in globally inspired haute recipes, and money to burn on the premium ingredients to make those recipes, grocery store offerings are still lagging behind. Sesame oil has lived in the American pantry for decades as a back-of-the-shelf key to making a stir-fry that, for some reason, tastes nothing like takeout (we only now understand the importance of velveting and wok hei). Beyond attempting the occasional East Asian dish, sesame oil has never found a place in the American cooking repertoire, largely because most Americans simply don’t know what to do with it. The oil burns easily, has a strong flavor, and often goes bad by the time it’s fished out of the cupboard a second time. But with a new interest in authentic (or authentically inspired) recipes, America now has a base of consumers willing to learn about sesame oil, and how to use it. They just needed an oil to teach them; a gateway oil, if you will.

It makes sense, also, that sesame oil would be the next course in a curriculum of renewed oil education for Americans — the previous one being olive oil, and all of its finer nuances. While Americans have largely understood the value of a good bottle of EVOO for years, a new generation of finishing oils in bottles that eschew engravings of the Italian countryside and gold-crested labels for funky typography and minimalist, thick-lined doodles have reignited the quest to understand oil. Some we hate (seed), some we love (avocado…? I’m not sure), and some we have yet to fully understand. Enter Sooki.

Branding

Design studio The Collected Works did the branding for Sooki, creating a subtly Hangul-inspired font and a cartoon mascot, Sooki Boy, dressed in traditional Korean clothing but with bottles of sesame oil for arms. This is confusing, not just because his arms are bottles, but because there seems to already be a mascot for the brand — a cute, cartoon girl, likely meant to evoke the founders’ mom, whose nickname is “Sooki.” On the front of the bottle, this girl hugs a cartoon sesame seed, which also has a minimal, cute face. Luckily, most of Sooki’s branding relies on these characters and their unifying aesthetic, rather than…Sooki Boy.

The label is cream-colored, with all graphics in a dark, luxurious red. The bottle itself looks more like an upscale whiskey bottle, an impression bolstered by the rich brownness of the oil. It’s hard to imagine this was unintentional. Taking a note both from other upscale Asian CPG designs, as well as contemporary premium oil brands, the product nods to its Korean heritage, but doesn’t lead with it. Rather, the first impact the bottle makes is one of minimalism, unique but playful design, and accessible quality. This is a bottle of sesame oil that commands a place on the countertop, rather than stuffed into a cupboard, where its predecessors lived.

This branding approach is what poises Sooki to be the oil that leads the sesame revolution. It speaks the same language as the brands its target consumers love — Graza, Fishwife, Momofuku — instantly associating it with the same level of quality, and making it feel welcoming to shoppers who may not yet be sure what to do with it, but are determined to find out.

Positioning

Premium oil, premium price — who can blame them? $40 for a big bottle of oil hardly seems unreasonable to a consumer who doesn’t have much experience with sesame oil in the first place, especially considering what comparable finishing oils cost.

Considering it is an imported product, Sooki’s $40 price tag would actually be a steal if it were made with domestic Korean sesame seeds — keep in mind that unbranded, freshly pressed bottles at the market can go for almost that much. But, upon further research, it turns out Sooki’s seeds come from Hubei, China, making it more comparable to the 10,000 won ($7.15) bottles in the market. Knowing this, or not, most Korean (or even East Asian) consumers seeing the product on American shelves are likely to balk at the price and grab a bottle of what their family has always used. But the kind of consumers Sooki is after don’t have that experience, or that base of knowledge — for them, this bottle is an exciting gateway into a new cuisine, and new experiments with food. If they’re shopping in Mast Marketplace in the first place, $40 isn’t likely to scare them off.

Sooki in Korea

Not likely to happen — and I have no reason to believe the founders want it to. But it’s interesting to consider why a product that represents Korean cuisine, and is a tool in its authentic recreation abroad, couldn’t make it in Korea itself.

First, an important point of context is that young Koreans are cooking less and less. When they do take to the kitchen, they tend to create trendy recipes they see on social media, or that dominate the menus of vaguely Western fusion restaurants across the country. Somewhat tragically, the average Korean who does cook isn’t at home whipping up the banchan, braises, and stews that their mother, grandmother, and so on would have. So they’re not in the market for premium sesame oil.

That’s not to say there aren’t Koreans cooking traditional Korean food in Korea — even young ones. But any Korean home cook who’s devoted to their cuisine already has their brands, and knows better than to pay more than 10,000 won for a bottle of oil made with Chinese sesame seeds — or even to use such an oil at all.

The branding is also counterintuitively unlikely to help. While many would presume, not altogether incorrectly, that anything “cute” makes the cut in Korea, that has so far yet to be the case for traditional ingredients. Snacks and desserts, sure — but applying this kind of minimal, cutesy branding to a product that generations of Koreans grew up with would serve only to make it feel like an outsider’s attempt at a hustle.

Premium sesame oils in Korea feature branding that feels mature, serious, and elegant — much like traditional upscale olive oils. In time, young consumers may be wooed by funkier, hipper branding, but as of yet, that’s not the case.

So while Sooki would be the black sheep of sesame oil in Korea, it’s in a perfect place to spearhead the premium sesame oil market in America (and elsewhere). What Americans do with the oil remains to be seen, but it’s likely that very soon, any kitchen with a bottle of Graza will have a bottle of Sooki sitting right next to it.

I return home to New York roughly once a year. Since COVID, or maybe even before, the changes that occur in a single year are staggering, and predictably so. By now I can safely assume, each time I land, that a handful of the shops, cafés, bars, and restaurants that defined the landscape of my childhood—or ones I came to accept, and then love, as recent additions to this ever-evolving city—will be gone. In their place will stand newer ones, foreign to my evidently obsolete sense of New York values, commerce, and culture. That’s the better outcome; the worse is the disconcertingly ubiquitous vacant storefront, available for rent to, apparently, no one in particular—hollow shells harvesting tax write-offs for their owners while vacuuming up whatever scraps of community still cling with desperate static to this sleek metropolis.

An equally predictable distress occurs when I update my mental ledger to reflect what things now cost. Like my understanding of what this city appreciates, wants, and needs, my idea of reasonable pricing for daily expenditures is hopelessly outdated. In my mind, a subway ride is $2, as is a cone from Mister Softee, and a hot dog. The average cheese slice—not a dollar slice, but the good stuff—hovers around $2.50, maybe $3. A breakfast sandwich from a coffee cart costs about the same. Chinese takeout lunch specials start at $6.95, with nicer spots capping premium selections at $10.95 for those willing to splurge. Dinner for under $12? Not easy, but doable.

Except it isn’t, and hasn’t been for quite some time. Between my annual visits, prices rose incrementally—a quarter here, fifty cents there, a dollar. One of the world’s most expensive cities simply continued to become more expensive. No real surprise there.

Yet this year felt different. Between national politics, global economics, AI, unchecked capitalism, military interventionism, cronyism, and the myriad other -isms and their attendant fallout, the leap has been drastically steeper.

A box of strawberries is $14. That was the reality that accosted me as I walked through the Union Square Greenmarket on my second day back. Sure, a box of flavorless, engineered Driscoll’s could be procured from a street vendor for a seventh of that price. But strawberries that actually taste like strawberries—the ones a human planted, watered, picked, and packed into a green, recycled paper box? $14, please.

A good chunk of that reflects the cost of renting a stall at the market, no doubt. The majority of the $15 I paid for a bowl of pho at Mott Pho Bang certainly went the same way—not toward the cloudy broth, nor the remarkably rectangular, perfectly toothsome rice noodles submerged in it. Much of that $15 didn’t even go toward the generous blanket of brisket or the scoop of delicately gelatinous tendon topping the bowl. Rather, a sizable cut went to the owner of 157 Mott Street, where this small, unassuming, endearingly untouched space has done business for several decades.

Landlords are evil, goes the axiom that most New Yorkers—especially the ones who aren’t landlords—use to anchor their grief at the loss of their city, square foot by square foot, dollar by dollar. It’s an oversimplified yet not inaccurate point on which to lay blame, allowing a New Yorker to soak instead in a sort of resigned sadness. It was this same sadness I saw in the faces of my friends when I regaled them with the horror of $14 strawberries. Well, yeah, they’d say with a nod, their eyes betraying the discomfort of admitting so readily the obviousness of this reality. What did you expect?

This reaction was universal—not the gasp I anticipated, but something much sadder. No torches? No pitchforks? Whoever’s responsible for this, we’re just going to let them get away with $14 strawberries? Well, yeah. That’s what strawberries cost now. Welcome to New York.

Each time I received this unsatisfactory reaction, I deployed a second horror story, a gouge so unthinkable, so heinous, that surely my friends would feel the freshness of the wound I was nursing:

“…and Mister Softee is $6 for a cone!”

Then, an interesting thing happened. Each time, from each person, I got the backlash I so craved. The face of whomever I burdened with this information would contort into a distinct expression of disgust. Six dollars? Get the fuck outta here.

What did it mean? Strawberries could be expensive, but ice cream could not. Surely that wasn’t the whole story.

Perhaps it’s that, as children in New York—my friends from the Upper West Side, from the Bronx, from Queens; from luxe Madison Avenue apartments and compact Forest Hills duplexes—none of us were running to Union Square for boxes of local berries. But being robbed of the small, enduring seasonal joy we could all find on whatever block we spent our summers, attainable for crumpled pocket money, was simply too much.

And who was prying that from us? Was it the infamous and occasionally turf-war-prone cartel that is Mister Softee? Was it the city agencies issuing wildly exorbitant licenses and permits, or the distributors selling marked-up soft-serve mix? Was it Ben Van Leeuwen and his ilk, who taught New Yorkers that ice cream not only could, but should be a luxury commanding a commensurate price? Or was it the transplants (hiss), the New New Yorkers for whom money is no object and Mister Softee is no memory, for whom a six-dollar chocolate cone with rainbow sprinkles, as an occasional break from a twelve-dollar cup of olive oil and Maldon sea salt gelato, looks like a fair deal?

Probably all of the above. And my friends and I—New York millennials now growing into the early stages of a crotchetiness fueled by nostalgic ramblings ping-ponged off each other over happy hour well drinks or coffee in Anthora cups—are neither the only nor the most important victims. Our sad resignation at a $14 box of strawberries and incredulity at a $6 ice cream cone stem from memories of what it felt like to pay a reasonable price for something. That is a memory a new generation of New York kids apparently won’t have. What that portends for them, and for their city, is bleak.

In the short term, I shudder to imagine what I’ll find next time I come back, in a year or so. Prices will be higher, streets emptier, and my friends sunken deeper into the grief of slowly watching their city be stripped away from them. And yet, whatever a box of strawberries or an ice cream cone costs, I will always come back.

In recent decades, as the world has become aware of Korea beyond its popular music, popular visual media, and popular skincare, so too has it come to appreciate the breadth of the country’s cafe culture. An incessant drive for productivity paired with an unbridled love of social media has created an industry built on caffeine, delivered aesthetically. The reasons for Korea’s remarkable coffee scene are many and nuanced, and may be discussed in a future piece — because as interesting as these impeccably decorated, immaculately branded, masterfully brewing (well, sometimes) cafes are, they’re not what we’re talking about.

Instead, we turn to the archetypal Korean cafe’s controversial cousin and frequent rival: the Korean quick-service coffee franchise. Over the last decade, several chains have blanketed streets throughout Korea with vibrant, often nearly identical colors and signage. Their core offering is the same: americanos or iced americanos, served almost comically large, for between ₩1,000 and ₩2,000 ($0.68–$1.36) a pop.

Production is largely automated, the experience hyper-efficient, and the coffee watery and terrible. Yet through vertically integrated roasting and supply chains, these companies have engineered a way to extract the maximum amount of caffeine from the lowest-quality beans, then sell the result at a price that can hardly invite criticism, if consumers even have any to give.

It’s important to note that these chains sell much more than coffee. Their beverage menus are sprawling, packed with coffee-free options that are sweet, creamy, colorful, and often more popular than the coffee itself. In this way, K-coffee franchises occupy a space that doesn’t quite exist in the United States: one part Blank Street, one part Dunkin’.

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In Korea, however, the space is entirely theirs. There are currently more than 100,000 cafes operating across the country; over 26,000 of them are low-cost franchise outlets belonging to a small handful of brands. Mega Coffee, Compose Coffee, Paik Dabang, Mammoth Coffee, and The Venti are among the major players that can’t be missed. Most locations have minimal floor plans, with a couple of seats tossed in almost as an afterthought. Ordering is frequently done through an app, so drinks are waiting at a pickup window by the time the customer arrives. These coffee chains are essentially embellished vending machines, offering maximum efficiency at maximum value, and over the last decade, they’ve taken over Korea.

Yet their conquest appears to have stalled. Between 2022 and 2024, while franchise headquarters saw revenue grow by 10.8%, average per-store sales fell by 7.6%. Competition between these nearly indistinguishable brands is fierce, and margins are razor-thin. Perhaps most dangerously, the chains have boxed themselves into an unforgiving price ceiling. With no tangible differentiation and no real brand loyalty, the second any one of these chains raises its prices, customers will immediately default to one of their competitors, rarely more than a block away.

Which introduces another issue — the chains have fully saturated the market. There’s simply not enough retail space in the country to enable them to expand further without cannibalizing their own sales. And so, all at once, these brands seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: it’s time to move to greener pastures.

But while each franchise has set its sights on global expansion, the territories and strategies in their crosshairs differ considerably. Much of that is the result of where the money is coming from.

Plans of Attack

Compose Coffee, for example, is backed by the war chest of Jollibee Foods Corporation, which acquired a 70% stake in the company in 2024. Leveraging Compose’s Korean roasting operation alongside JFC’s enormous fast-food infrastructure throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the company is focusing first on Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, with branches already operating in Taiwan and the Philippines. Once Southeast Asia is secured, the plan is to move into MENA, and eventually the United States.

Mega Coffee, Korea’s largest coffee chain with more than 3,000 stores, established its first beachhead in Mongolia, where several outlets in Ulaanbaatar have reportedly performed well. It also has a Japanese subsidiary prepared for a Tokyo launch and is currently constructing an ambitious flagship in New York City.

Mammoth Coffee is now owned by Singaporean private equity firm Orchestra, which acquired the chain in January of this year and has chosen Japan—not Singapore—as its first international focus. Several Tokyo locations have already opened and seen promising early success.

The Venti has locations in Vietnam in the Philippines, where Paik’s Coffee has also operated to positive results since 2023. The former has already entered North America with Canadian locations and plans for Las Vegas, while the latter appears to be laying the groundwork for its own North American debut with an updated brand identity—a rebrand I challenge, and redesign, in the following piece:

As for these initial international launches, reception has been broadly positive. Each brand has experienced a surge of demand in its respective test market and seems to be taking this as confirmation that global expansion is the correct strategy. But that early success comes with several substantial asterisks that require some culture-specific context to understand.

Southeast Asia

The Southeast Asian market (as well as Taiwan and Mongolia), by far the heaviest testbed for these franchises, is obsessed with Korean popular culture. K-pop, K-dramas, and increasingly K-F&B are mainstays throughout these countries — far from an exotic novelty, they are the defining cultural tides across the region. That means anything related to Korean consumerism is of immediate interest, including the massive cups of coffee Korean celebrities can be seen holding during film shoots, training sessions, or product placements. This is a powerful starter engine for brands in the region, and should be more than enough to keep stores profitable in the first year or two — but sustained returns are far less certain.

Once the novelty factor wears off, a number of threats emerge that could jeopardize the long-term success of quick-service K-coffee. The first: quick-service C-coffee. Though lacking the cultural credibility of Korean chains, Chinese coffee giants have been in the region longer, and have hit it harder. Chains like Luckin Coffee, Cotti Coffee, and Mixue have been burning cash for years to acquire customers, offering nearly free cups to get people into their apps. This is no bait-and-switch — these chains maintain loyalty by offering prices that even Korean franchises can’t compete with, especially given their even deeper venture-capital backing and fully established supply chains.

Additionally, Southeast Asian countries have their own coffee palates, which in more cases than not aren’t compatible with the watery, arabica-based Americanos Korean chains are known for. Vietnam’s hardcore robusta culture is legendary; Indonesia and Taiwan are the Mecca and Medina of coffee cultivation in Asia, and are unlikely to embrace the comparatively poor roasts of Korean chains for long. Northern Thailand occupies a similar position, while the country as a whole leans toward coffee beverages mixed with juices and syrups, requiring heavy menu localization to catch up with — localization that would likely neutralize margins, or the chains’ low-cost positioning.

An additional, crucial consideration is Southeast Asia’s reliance on ultra-fast food and beverage delivery, primarily through Grab. Unlike Western or Korean delivery apps, Grab primarily gets its cut from the business rather than the customer — free delivery is common and expected, especially from chains. Existing long term in Southeast Asia without delivery would be futile; incorporating delivery into the equation would mean either raising prices or sacrificing profitability.

And yet, while Southeast Asia presents myriad challenges to long-term adoption, it remains considerably friendlier territory than the more ambitious targets these brands ultimately have in their sights.

Japan

K-consumerism isn’t without influence in Japan, but it doesn’t hold nearly the same sway as it does in Southeast Asia. As a mature, hyper-efficient, highly price-sensitive coffee market, Japan’s bellwether for success has been different, yet offers a similarly false assurance of long-term profitability.

For decades, the Japanese economy was defined by price stability and deflation — an environment that allowed for discretionary spending on quality, artisanal indulgences, and a longstanding culture of lingering in third spaces like kissatens or modern, upscale coffee shops. Since the pandemic, this has no longer been the case.

Japanese consumers have suddenly become much more focused on saving and budgeting, paying close attention to what has been termed the “cost performance” of everyday purchases. Coffee is no exception. Quality is increasingly being sacrificed for value, and the romance of the pseudo-European cafe experience traded in for efficient caffeine delivery. Korean quick service — the stage is yours.

Mammoth Coffee has thus, unsurprisingly, seen initial success in office-heavy districts of Tokyo. Like in Korea, corporate employees need low-cost pick-me-ups on their way to the office, and Korean coffee fits the bill. Mega Coffee and Ppaik Dabang have taken note, and are planning to get in on the action. Here, too, early success is to be expected; long-term success, maybe not so much.

Like Southeast Asia, Japan already has an established quick-service, low-cost coffee infrastructure — only here, it’s domestic. For decades, Japanese convenience stores have filled this niche with cut-rate coffee that’s actually not all that bad, considering it came out of a 7-Eleven. The automated machines that grind, press, and brew an impressive variety of coffee drinks are hardly different from the ones baristas push buttons on in Korean chains, and the supply chain that keeps them stocked with cheap beans is massive and bulletproof. Korean coffee chains may offer some initial novelty, but a switch back to Lawson or FamilyMart will always be just around the corner.

A greater threat lies in a key distinction between Japan and Korea: real estate and labor costs. While Koreans frequently lament rising rents and hourly wages, they still pale in comparison to those of many similarly developed countries. Japan is one such case. A persistent labor shortage has driven wages even higher, and Tokyo’s commercial leases are unforgiving by any standard. Korean quick-service chains will therefore find themselves sandwiched between the need to compete with convenience-store coffee prices while maintaining profitable margins under substantially higher operating costs. Assuming demand remains strong — already a generous assumption — is that tenable in the long term? We’ll have to see.

The United States

Through a combination of complex historical relationships and decades of cultural reverence, the United States has become the default first target for Korean companies looking to expand globally. Perhaps rooted more in cultural mythology than hard analysis, the prevailing wisdom seems to be something along the lines of: if you’ve made it to the U.S., you’ve made it, period.

Several of the aforementioned chains have placed America as the final stop on a global franchising tour — the most ambitious and coveted market to crack, once all the others are secured. Yet a few — The Venti, Mega Coffee, and Ppaik Dabang, specifically — are already attempting to dip their toes in.

What they’re up against is the challenge of challenges. Right off the bat, the U.S. shares Japan’s brutal real estate and labor cost realities — except, worse. In the biggest cities, rent is exorbitant, and coffee shops serve as essential third spaces. A cafe without Wi-Fi, tables, and a bathroom may survive, but it will at least need to differentiate itself through the quality of its products, something these chains inherently lack. Interest in Korean culture certainly exists, but it’s sparse compared to Southeast Asia. It’s hard to imagine what New Yorkers passing Mega Coffee’s first American location — now under construction on West 23rd Street — will think of the bright yellow storefront and its cheap (though not cheaper than a coffee cart) offerings. Will oversized Americanos emblazoned with Son Heung-min’s face replace the blue-and-white Anthora cup? It’s daring to imagine so.

In the rest of the country, the chains’ sweeter, creamier menu items could go toe-to-toe with the whatever-iccinos of Dunkin’ and Starbucks, and beat them on price. Here, however, accessibility becomes the issue. These beverage chains exist outside American cities largely by virtue of the drive-thru model, one that requires a physical footprint and at least some seating — almost the exact opposite of Korean quick-service coffee’s tiny kiosks. Yet those kiosks aren’t likely to pay the rent in suburban strip malls. As in Seoul, Tokyo, and Southeast Asia, they rely on dense foot traffic to make up for their razor-thin margins. The reality is that nothing they serve is especially worth driving somewhere, parking, and getting out of the car for.

All of which is to say, whether any of these chains can carve out a stable, profitable, permanent place in their new target markets remains to be seen. Their simultaneous push beyond Korea is a gamble they have little choice but to take. Yet how each chain approaches international expansion — and how effectively it adapts its strategy to each market — will determine who lasts, who doesn’t, and teach the rest of us a great deal about global expansion in the process.

In the meantime, wherever you may be, you’re probably about to see a lot of dirt-cheap, ultra convenient, very bad Korean coffee.

As one of the key players in the burgeoning K-coffee war, Paik’s Coffee has found itself in a difficult position. While a massive company by any standards, it remains the runt of the litter — despite selling virtually the same products as its competitors at similar prices, this chain has no venture capital backing and, perhaps more importantly, faces some unique branding challenges.

So, in the interest of preparing for a global expansion to keep up with its contemporaries, Paik’s Coffee recently rebranded as Paik’s Dabang — a confusing move, since the chain has always been known in Korea as “빽다방” (Ppaik Dabang). It also removed the founder’s face from the logo and released an updated wordmark that will serve as its international brand identity.

This rebrand is rife with missteps, which can only be understood in full with background knowledge of the brand’s history and an understanding of the relevant cultural context in both Korea and the United States.

We’ll begin by examining the history of Paik’s, dissecting the logic behind (and problems with) its existing domestic branding, then move on to the international rebrand before proposing a complete re-rebrand (with pictures!) that systematically addresses each of the challenges we uncover along the way.

This is a unique exercise for several reasons that will become apparent as we dive deeper into the case study, but it should be established at the outset what the stakes are: as the underdog among a cadre of fast-growing, aggressively expanding Korean quick-service coffee giants, Paik’s success in international markets will hinge on the strength of its refreshed branding. Anything less than exceptional (very much including the current iteration) will almost certainly result in failure.

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The Background

Who is Paik Jong Won?

This warrants its own piece, or several. In short, he is unequivocally the most famous celebrity chef in South Korea. He cut his teeth in the restaurant game in the mid-1990s and, with more of a mind for business than any particular technical skill in the culinary arts, launched a number of successful franchise brands in the early 2000s. By the mid-2010s, he was a regular on countless Korean variety shows and had single-handedly made a major impact on the country’s food culture — one that many now consider largely negative, as he is widely blamed for the sweetening of Korean cuisine as a whole.

As of 2026, his hospitality company, Theborn Korea (already, the company’s ineptitude at branding has made itself evident), operates 25 different franchise brands comprising more than 3,200 locations. In Korean F&B, the man is a machine.

Why Does He Own a Quick Service Coffee Franchise?

Paik’s first restaurant was Wonjo Ssambap, a traditional Korean homestyle restaurant that he acquired in 1993. As such, the branding was not his; wonjo means “original” in Korean, and is a very common, generic descriptor for restaurants throughout the country. He struck gold by slicing frozen pork belly with a deli slicer and serving it as a main dish. This was considered a substantial culinary innovation at the time, and catapulted both him and the restaurant to their first real level of recognition.

By 2006, Paik was fairly well known in Korea, though far from the level of stardom he would achieve a decade later. At this time, a small independent café next door to Wonjo Ssambap was struggling, and the owner reportedly asked Paik to buy him out. Paik obliged, taking over the café with the strategy of serving inexpensive coffee to customers waiting in line for his restaurant. He renamed it “Wonjobucks,” a shameless parody of Starbucks, right down to the logo.

Surprise, surprise: Starbucks sued. The brand became “Wonjo Coffee,” with a strange pseudo-Starbucks-inspired logo that, like almost all of Paik’s franchise brands, continued to feature his face. The following year, it changed again to “Paik’s Coffee,” now featuring a caricature of Paik inexplicably wearing a nón lá hat. Finally, in 2015, the brand became Ppaik Dabang, while English-language press and marketing materials continued referring to it as “Paik’s Coffee,” hence the confusion mentioned earlier. The logo featured a cleaner cartoon illustration of Paik holding a cup of coffee, while the now-iconic yellow and blue brand colors were established.

Up to this point, the franchise had plodded along with only a handful of locations and no particular success to speak of. Coincidentally, 2015 was also the year Paik reached the height of his television fame, appearing on several hugely successful Korean shows while opening more franchise brands. It was also a period of slowing economic growth, during which consumers increasingly gravitated toward products perceived as affordable and high-value. The timing was perfect; a bargain coffee chain with Paik’s face on it could hardly go anywhere but up.

That year alone, the franchise opened 400 locations, and from 2016 onward its expansion stabilized. Ppaik Dabang had become a major player in Korea’s dirt-cheap, hyper-efficient takeout coffee market. As of 2026, the franchise operates more than 1,800 stores domestically.

Why “Ppaik Dabang?”

First, the man’s name is 백 (Paik, or more accurately, Baek) — not 빽, or Ppaik. But doubling the initial consonant gives the name a sharper sound while making it feel a little more rustic, homespun, and approachable.

More importantly, a dabang is a traditional Korean coffee house. Coffee has existed in Korea since the late nineteenth century, but became widely available after the Korean War, when American GIs introduced sweet, milky instant coffee, which remained Korea’s standard style of coffee for decades. Dabangs served this powdered coffee alongside traditional Korean teas and simple food. They became gathering places where older patrons, usually men, would smoke cigarettes and spend hours socializing. It was also common for some female dabang owners to sell sexual services under the guise of coffee delivery. This isn’t strictly relevant, but it’s too salacious not to mention.

Dabangs still exist today, but they are a world apart from the immaculately designed, quality-forward cafés Korea has become famous for. Most surviving dabangs are aging relics of a bygone, intentionally forgotten era, patronized primarily by nostalgic older customers. To the modern Korean consumer, then, dabang doesn’t evoke something trendy or contemporary. Instead, it paints a picture of a cozy, retro café that many coffee drinkers’ parents remember fondly.

It stands to reason that Ppaik Dabang chose this name to appeal to a broader age demographic while strengthening its identity as a distinctly Korean brand. While competitors like Mega Coffee, Compose Coffee, The Venti, and Mammoth have generally opted for generic, globally palatable branding, Ppaik Dabang has leaned into its Korean roots since 2015. The international rebrand’s decision to retain “Dabang” rather than reverting to “Coffee” reinforces that strategy. This is notable, and important.

What’s Wrong with Ppaik Dabang’s Domestic Branding?

Apparently not all that much, since the brand has done quite well — domestically. But had the franchise intended to expand beyond Korea from the beginning, several considerations that should have been made clearly were not.

First, a universal point about branding: regardless of territory or culture, tying a brand to a single person is extraordinarily dangerous. A spokesperson is bad enough — remember what happened to Subway? — but having the founder of the brand, a mainstream celebrity, front and center is an enormous gamble. The same risk exists for Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant empire, for example, or Nusr-Et; should the people at the center of those brands become embroiled in a public scandal, the crisis management would be a nightmare.

That aside, Paik Jong Won is a very, very local celebrity — he doesn’t have the kind of social media-fueled global appeal that other famous chefs might. Having his face plastered across storefronts throughout Korea may appeal to domestic consumers, but it can only serve to confuse visitors or tourists unfamiliar with the country’s variety-show landscape.

Finally, there’s a major disconnect within the brand identity between “dabang” and… everything else. Nothing about the modern, corporate, minimal, blindingly bright stores feels even referential to the Korean coffee houses of old. It would be akin to Blank Street retaining its current brand identity but changing its name to Smith’s Coffee Cottage.

In fact, any notion of Korean-ness or differentiation from other quick-service franchises begins and ends with the name; otherwise, the shops feel largely indistinguishable and forgettable beyond their practical value.

What’s Wrong with Ppaik Dabang’s International Rebranding?

Actually, let’s start with what they did right. First, they got rid of Paik’s face. Excellent move, and really the only sensible choice if the brand hopes to succeed abroad.

Next, they retained the Korean brand name, in Hangul, on the signage. This is entirely unique among globally focused competitors, and a smart way of keeping attention on the brand’s Korean roots — a good strategy given the world’s continued appetite for anything prefixed with “K-.”

From here, things get disappointing.

The rebrand overall is hopelessly generic — comments on a TikTok video I made about it compared it to a butter brand or a local shipping company. Hidden within the forgettable script is an “image of a coffee bean,” which I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t pointed it out, and may still be struggling to find — both hallmarks of abysmal graphic design.

While the layout and overwhelmingly bright colors leave much to be desired, the biggest issue is a deeper one: the name Paik’s Dabang is, to the vast majority of Americans, both unpronounceable and meaningless. Paik will inevitably become “Pake” or “Pike.” Why the brand chose this romanization — arguably the least intuitive one — for a name pronounced much closer to “Beck” is a head-scratcher. And while brands don’t lose sales simply because customers mispronounce their name, they would be wise to minimize unnecessary friction when entering a new market.

Dabang presents the same problem. It will become “Da Bang,” at best the victim of the same American pronunciation that Da Nang has endured for decades, and at worst the butt of endless juvenile jokes. More importantly, while the word carries some nostalgic value in Korea, it is completely devoid of meaning to an American audience. It isn’t one of the Korean words or cultural concepts familiar even to Americans already interested in Korean culture; it doesn’t inhabit the same cultural space as K-pop, K-dramas, or contemporary Korean cafés. It requires education that, were it central to the experience of the brand itself, might be worth investing in. But, as established, there is nothing remotely dabang-esque about Ppaik Dabang.

So the brand, as it stands, fits comfortably neither in the American mouth nor the American mind. It’s awkward to read, say, hear, and make sense of — a constellation of problems that can only hamper its entry into one of the most competitive coffee markets in the world.

Preparation for the Re-rebrand

To solve the myriad issues with Ppaik Dabang’s rebrand in a strategic, intentional way while preserving the elements that seem important to the company, let’s first establish a few design principles.

• The rebrand needs a new name that is recognizably Korean, connected to the company’s history, yet easily pronounceable for American consumers.

• Visually, the brand should pay homage to retro Korean graphic design, in keeping with its attachment to traditional coffee houses.

• The logo should incorporate both Korean and English.

• The brand colors should remain blue and yellow — but probably not the same blue and yellow.

With those principles established, we can work through the redesign point by point.

The Name

Theborn Korea is sitting on a gold mine of opportunity here, and they don’t seem to realize it.

Paik’s, Ppaik’s, Baek’s, and the like are all dangerously tied to a person Americans don’t know, while also relying on romanizations that are anything but intuitive. But the brand’s original iteration — Wonjo — is one of the rare transliterated Korean words that is immediately phonetic and approachable to an English-speaking audience.

Wonjo means “original,” giving it genuine historical relevance to the brand. And, as an added bonus, it contains the syllable jo, a homophone of Joe — classic American slang for coffee. Too easy!

The Visual Identity

Dabangs aren’t sexy (well…), but their signage certainly can be.

Vintage Korean storefronts are a treasure trove of funky, hand-painted typography and charming graphic flourishes that modern Korean brands largely seem to ignore. While we’re abandoning the dabang name and concept, we can still borrow from the visual language it evokes.

Older Korean signage also often placed small circles beneath Hanja characters to indicate their pronunciation or meaning for readers unfamiliar with them. It’s an analog convention, but an understatedly elegant one. Reinterpreted slightly, it could become a distinctive bilingual graphic device.

The Colors

Blue and yellow aren’t traditionally associated with coffee in the United States, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work.

They simply need to be toned down. Rather than feeling like packaging for a remote-control car, the palette should evoke an effortlessly stylish Korean café.

The Re-rebrand

With all of that in place, here’s what I would propose as a more effective rebrand:

Presenting Won Joe Coffee House. Won Joe feels slightly foreign, a little old-school, yet subtly connected to coffee. The Hangul set inside circles above the title immediately communicates that the brand is Korean, even to those who can’t read the language. Meanwhile, Coffee House preserves the spirit of the dabang concept, conjuring an image of a warm, human space rather than a hyper-efficient takeaway kiosk.

The colors remain blue and yellow, but not that blue and yellow. While the blue feels premium and understated, the yellow evokes rich vanilla, an eggy custard, or butter on a pastry; dessert-y, sensuous, and coffee-adjacent.

For the sub-branding, a bold proposition: let’s just keep it in Korean. Those explanatory circles come front and center to become the sub-mark, and whether or not people can read them, the association will be made quickly. Plus, being the first Korean brand to not only embrace Hangul abroad but thrust it confidently to the forefront will do wonders for the image and character of the brand.

Korean cafés are increasingly recognized internationally for their thoughtful interiors and architectural design. Why not lean into that? Update these compact franchise locations so they feel warm, welcoming, and intentionally designed, rather than overtly commercial coffee outlets.

With updated packaging, the chain can continue selling inexpensive, sugary drinks — only now they feel a touch more premium, and unmistakably Korean. Simply redesigning the cup sleeves dramatically changes how the products, and by extension the brand, are perceived.

Final Thoughts

Paik Jong Won’s quick-service coffee brand is far from the first company to underestimate the importance of cross-cultural analysis when undertaking a global rebrand. Large Korean corporations are rightly infamous for lagging behind contemporary design conventions and the kind of natural, effortlessly cool branding that resonates internationally. That weakness only becomes more pronounced when entering unfamiliar markets. If they’ve managed to succeed without mastering branding on their home court, can they realistically expect the same abroad?

I’d argue they cannot.

I’d also argue this isn’t a uniquely Korean problem. The broader lesson is that business — branding especially — cannot be divorced from culture, a reality that’s uncomfortably qualitative for organizations that necessarily live in the quantitative. Yet succeeding in a new market depends on understanding how its consumers think, feel, behave, and buy. If they can’t comfortably pronounce your name, or don’t understand what it means, an already uphill battle becomes significantly steeper.

Nongshim, the South Korean company behind major ramyun brands such as Shin Ramyun, Chapagetti, and Neoguri, is planning a series of activations in New York as part of its ongoing effort to capture the American instant noodle market. So far, its plans include a collaboration with Atoboy—the Korean-inspired, Michelin-recognized Manhattan restaurant—and a bunsik booth installation at the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY).

This booth installation, specifically, is a common marketing tactic of theirs. Last year, they executed similar activations in Times Square and JFK airport, followed by a feature on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier this year.

If all of this seems a bit lackluster at best, and painfully desperate at worst, then you may be on to something. The company’s sudden, aggressively intentioned but weakly executed push in North America comes from a few factors—some strategically reasonable, others frenzied and fear-based. But it also belies an ignorance of, or disinterest in, the realities of American cultural psychology around this product in particular, and overall trends in CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) branding and marketing.

It’s nothing new that a massive Korean conglomerate hasn’t done its due diligence in preparing nuanced localization, incorporating consumer insights, or even thoroughly planning a marketing push. Through an in-depth and hopefully concise (I’ll do my best) survey of what’s at play here, we can learn where companies can, and often do, fall short—and what they should be doing differently.

A Major Cultural Gap, Rooted in History

Instant noodles entered the market in Korea as a response to post-war famine. With a surplus of American wheat and a starving population, one local entrepreneur realized the need for an affordable, shelf-stable carbohydrate when rice was scarce. Ramyun quickly became a lifeline for millions of Koreans, occupying a space as the “second rice” of the cuisine that endures today. Convenience stores and grocery marts have entire aisles dedicated to varieties of instant noodles—the average consumer in Korea goes through about two packs a week, with younger consumers eating substantially more.

In America, on the other hand, the 4-minute meal was introduced as a foreign, Japanese novelty in the 1970s. Interest was low, as was brand loyalty—so companies realized the need to pivot the product’s positioning to a bottom-shelf subsistence grocery. As America continued to enjoy prosperity, instant noodles became the food of those who missed out on it: college students, prisoners, and anyone with tight budgets and mouths to feed, who couldn’t afford to pay attention to a growing point of interest in the country: nutrition.

The result was a significant cultural gap: in Korea, a dependable staple food. In the U.S., bargain-bin junk.

In the last decade or so, as interest in Korean culture has spread in America, so too has interest in its instant noodles. Younger consumers are viewing Korean ramyun, both on social media and increasingly in grocery stores, with a new, refreshed perception: still instant, still cheap, but something a bit exotic, unique, and interesting. An experience, rather than a Styrofoam cup on a rushed lunch break.

But that shift has just begun. A generation(s)-old negative bias against the food (and, from a nutritional standpoint, one rightly deserved) will take far more time to match the enthusiasm that Korean consumers have for it. That’s not at all to say the market isn’t ready for the product, or the Shin Ramyun line specifically; rather, it’s a necessary point of reference that will come into play a bit later, and one that Nongshim has likely overlooked.

A New, Korean Generation of Noodles

In a space historically dominated by Japanese brands Nissin and Toyo Suisan’s Maruchan, Korean giants Nongshim (Shin Ramyun, Chapaghetti, Neoguri) and Samyang (Buldak) are quickly eating up a hefty portion of sales. But these culturally relevant Korean brands aren’t playing the same game as their Japanese counterparts. A pack of Korean noodles costs between $1.50 to $3.00, a significant splurge compared to the price of a pack of Maruchan—$0.35 to $0.50, on average.

How is this price difference justified? Most obviously, through a gap in quality. Korean noodles are made with a higher-grade wheat flour blend to create thick, air-dried, or premium-fried noodles with a firm, chewy texture, whereas budget-friendly dollar store staples are thin, flash-fried, and quickly turn to mush. And while Nissin and Maruchan soup bases boil down to a lot of salt, MSG, and artificial flavorings, Korean ramyun uses freeze-dried bone broths made from real beef or pork extracts, fermented bean pastes, and complex chili oil packets to create deeper, more memorable flavors.

While still undeniably “instant,” and not of any particular nutritional benefit, Korean ramyun has succeeded in feeling more like an efficient meal than a money-saving snack or casserole filler.

Korean ramyun also relies, wisely, on its associated cultural capital. While Nissin and Maruchan did their best to shirk their Japanese roots—to the point where no American consumer would reasonably consider a bowl of Creamy Chicken Cup Noodles or Lime Chili Shrimp Maruchan to be an imported treat—Nongshim and Samyang became prominent players in the American market just as interest in Korean dramas, music, and food began to surge.

Thus, the flavors on offer from these brands are, at least in name, the same as they would be in Korea—Shin Ramyun Black, Buldak, Chapaguri. They were initially meaningless to the average American consumer—but that’s the fun. These accessible instant noodles, while ten times more expensive than their competitors, offer an experience that remains highly affordable. For K-pop or K-drama fans, a chance to eat like your favorite idol or actor; for K-food fans, an authentic Korean culinary experience right in your kitchen. For everyone else, something new.

Ramyun Wars

Nongshim products have been exported to the United States since the late 1980s, but its real presence in the market began with the establishment of a factory in California to mass-produce noodles domestically, driving down shelf prices and enabling supply chain expansion into regional grocery chains and Costco warehouses. By 2017, Nongshim ramyun products were a ubiquitous presence in Walmart stores throughout the country, finally achieving mainstream awareness.

Samyang, on the other hand, exploded in popularity after the release of its Buldak line (fire chicken noodles) in 2012—the product’s extreme spice created a viral challenge that catapulted the brand into American recognition. Though it remained a coveted find for Gen Z consumers, Buldak continued to be an import-only product. Yet with an expanded product range and a remarkable social media presence, Buldak has continued to grow rapidly in the United States, finally breaking into mainstream grocery aisles between 2023 and 2024.

Currently, Nongshim holds about 25% of the instant noodle market in the US, and Samyang sits around 11%. But while Nongshim’s Shin Ramyun may represent the “standard” Korean noodle offering to most consumers, Samyang’s social media dominance and stand-out virality are making its competitor sweat—and with good reason. Their 37% year-over-year increase has Samyang set to capture 24% of the market by 2028. With limited time to cement its fragile dominance of the Korean noodle market, Nongshim is understandably scrambling to define its positioning and lock in loyalty with Gen Z consumers, specifically.

You know what that means: time for some experiential marketing.

The Nongshim Approach

Nongshim has decided to double down on its premiumization of ramyun, while also likely seeking to take advantage of America’s current woeful economic climate. This may seem like a contradiction, but if executed well, it’s actually quite appropriate. A $3.00 pack of instant noodles may be an indulgence for a loyal Maruchan enjoyer, but it’s still a generally affordable luxury. In this sense, it’s the perfect product to capitalize on the Lipstick Effect—the phenomenon of increased spending on small luxury items during periods of economic recession. Especially in cities like New York, which Nongshim has targeted with its Shin Ramyun marketing, a unique pack of instant noodles offers a much-needed respite from $45 casual meals, while still offering something a little new, a little exciting, and the tiniest bit premium.

So, in theory, Nongshim’s strategy is set in the right direction. But from here, things begin falling apart.

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Though I have no idea what Nongshim’s budget is for this marketing push, my eight years of working with large Korean companies allows me to say, with certainty, that Nongshim’s response to this substantial marketing challenge won’t incorporate the kind of risky, outside-the-box, noise-cutting strategy it really requires (especially in the American market). Undoubtedly conservative leadership, combined with a creativity-crushing feedback system—the hallmark of any Korean company of this size—guarantees that no matter what was drawn up initially, what actually gets executed will be rushed, diminished in scale, and uninspiring in effect.

While New York is a tantalizing market for the ripples of cultural capital it sends throughout the country, as well as an appropriate counterbalance to Shin Ramyun’s stable consumption base in the Asian-American communities of the West Coast, Nongshim’s actual marketing plans suggest the company has picked it for the wrong reasons.

Though consumers may accept Shin Ramyun as a very slight, relative luxury, a pop-up at Atoboy is a reach. The highly respected, Michelin-recognized fine dining hotspot is a space that, no matter how premium Shin Ramyun may be, it should not coexist in—at the end of the day, we’re still talking about instant noodles.

Yet the selection of this restaurant suggests to me that Nongshim’s marketing team wants New York for its high society, its exclusivity, its image-making, and its trend-breaking. For a luxury matcha brand, or an exclusive cookie launch—painful though it is for me, as a born-and-raised New Yorker, to admit—this might make sense. For instant noodles, it just doesn’t. Nongshim has set its sights on the wrong aspect of the right target.

From there, the approach becomes even more fractured, to the point of being downright confusing. Times Square? Fine. JFK Airport? A bit random, but okay. An installation on the second floor of the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY)—a non-descript office building run by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, where they’ve currently styled a booth as a Korean "PC Bang" gaming café? Hard to imagine how they came up with that one.

Overall, in scale and originality alike, this is far from the strategy Nongshim needs. But an even more dangerous issue looms larger, and the brand hasn’t yet seemed to take notice.

A Crisis of Branding

Here is what Consumer Packaged Goods in the Asian Foods category look like right now:

Colorful, eye-catching, minimal, but still clearly connected to the heritage of the brands.

Here is Shin Ramyun’s branding—virtually unchanged since its launch in 1986:

The difference is stark. Shin Ramyun’s branding occupies a dangerously ambiguous space: clean and corporate enough that it doesn’t feel like a traditional, old-school, heritage brand, but outdated enough that nothing about it is “cool” or particularly eye-catching. If Nongshim wants a refreshed brand perception, they need to begin with a refreshed brand. This is something that Jin Ramen, manufactured by Ottogi (which holds only 5% of the market in the US), realized and tried to implement in their recent rebrand:

Their intentions were clear, and on the right track. The execution was lacking, resulting in a combination of modern American graphic design conventions cobbled together with obviously rigid internal brand rules. But considering the goal of fitting in with contemporary CPG brand language in this space, the new branding does a better job than the previous iteration.

Here is my rough attempt at what a rebrand of Shin Ramyun might look like, if they were to take the approach of appealing to American consumers as a premium, trendy product:

This rebrand incorporates slightly augmented, more upscale key colors, emphasizing the essence and spice of the product. It flattens the branding to fit with contemporary conventions and uses minimal graphics of noodles, vegetables, and meat to imply to the consumer the inclusion of real, whole ingredients, presented in a simple, friendly way. The layout of a circle in the middle—functioning as a top-down presentation of a bowl of ramyun—is bordered by four icons in each corner, serving as a subtle call-out to the layout of the Korean flag. Key information is reorganized and presented in a logical, easily digestible way, rather than scattered across the packaging and vaguely structured.

This mockup is likely not the ideal redesign approach, given that I am not a professional graphic designer. But it includes some of the stylistic considerations the brand should take into account when trying to cement its position as the premium Korean ramyun that young Americans reach for in grocery stores.

The Nongshim Approach - My Rework

The New York strategy could be saved with some core alterations. Instead of pop-ups in hard-to-access locations with no real relation to the product, focus instead on the common ground of where the product lives for both New Yorkers and Koreans: in Korea, the ubiquitous, bright, clean, consumption-driving convenience store. In New York, the iconic bodega.

Nongshim can lean into its value of providing an authentic cultural experience for only a few dollars by installing “slices” of Korean convenience stores in partner bodegas across the city—bright, white walls showcasing its products with distinctly Korean-style price tags, complete with a ramyun boiling machine (common at Korean convenience stores, especially near the Han River).

Devoted K-culture fanatics will seek these installations out, as will the passively curious. For the uninitiated, the ease of buying, preparing, and eating a pack of ramyun on the spot will prove an instant conversion point. Consumers will associate the tangible slice of Korea they experienced in the store through the pop-up with the product itself—and indeed, a pot of Shin Ramyun boiled at home can deliver that experience endlessly.

Next, a fried ramyun pancake topped with cheese—to most American consumers, a prison recipe, or the brainchild of a stoned college student—at Atoboy is the wrong choice for several reasons. Ditch the Korean-inspired fine dining establishment, because this product isn’t Korean-inspired fine dining, and no service is done to either that cuisine or the product to combine them by force.

Rather, focus on Shin Ramyun’s convenience factor—it’s a high-quality meal available with minimal time and effort. Partner with top chefs across the city (or country, if we can break out of the confines of idyllic New York) representing various cuisines: Mexican, Nigerian, Filipino, etcetera. Ask what they would do with a pack of Shin Ramyun after a busy shift, as a meal for themselves and their staff. How would they, with their wealth of technical knowledge and obvious high standards for food, whip up Shin Ramyun to satisfy a universally relatable hunger at the end of the night? What would be their instant comfort food, using additional, cuisine-specific ingredients in their kitchens?

Offer these unique collaborative dishes as limited-time, not-so-secret menu items at their restaurants. Then, turn the series into digital content on Nongshim’s owned media channels to teach American viewers how to replicate these unique recipes at home—as long as they buy some Shin Ramyun noodles first.

And, if we can ditch the limiting goal of positioning Shin Ramyun as something “New York City Premium,” and expand its identity as a distinctive experience for an affordable price, take that cheese-covered ramyun pancake and sell it at state fairs or baseball stadiums. Be the frontrunner in positioning instant noodles as the kind of junk food Americans lust over (right up there with nachos, buffalo wings, and funnel cakes) rather than the kind they’re embarrassed to be seen eating.

It is entirely possible that ideas like these came out in the boardroom in initial ideation meetings, and were then bit by bit whittled down into the yawn-inducingly safe plan that’s been released. Or, perhaps Nongshim lacked the cultural insight needed from the beginning—hard to imagine, given its American subsidiary, but who knows. In any event, they are only one of countless companies around the world that fail to recognize the importance of deep cultural analysis and the crucially disruptive approaches only such analysis can yield.

On May 18th, Starbucks Korea launched a promotion for its Tank tumbler, a 503-milliliter insulated beverage receptacle. It offered 10% off a “Colorful Tank Tumbler Set,” and 21% off a “Tank Duo Set.” The promotion was branded as “Tank Day,” and visitors to Starbucks Korea’s website or app were greeted with a promotional card, at the top of which was the additional copy, “책상에 탁!” - “Bang! on the desk.”

A strange name for a promotion, and awkward copy, but to anyone unfamiliar with Korean history, this deal would seem innocuous enough. Yet backlash in the Korean market was swift and explosive enough for global spectators to take note, and learn a bit about Korea’s turbulent fight for democracy along the way; May 18th is the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when student-led demonstrations against Korea’s then-dictator Chun Doo-hwan were met with tanks, and then indiscriminate gunfire. Between 600 and 2,300 people were killed.

One of the most famous victims of the era was Park Jong-chul, a student activist who died during what detectives called a routine interrogation, but is largely understood to have been a torture session. At the time, the police offered a pithy excuse for his death—according to them, Park suffered a heart attack and died on the spot when a detective slammed his fist on the interrogation desk. “책상에 탁,” or “Bang! on the desk,” was the exact verbiage used.

The day after news broke of this outrageously offensive scandal, I scraped together what facts I could find from Korean news and social media sites, and made a TikTok video. Running a channel that focuses on Korean business strategy, culture, and events of note, I had never been handed a topic so current and prescient. I alluded to this sentiment in the first line of my video: “Of course I’m gonna talk about the Starbucks thing.”

The video shot up to 2 million views overnight, with commenters from around the world expressing the shock and disgust that I, and more importantly, countless Koreans, felt as well. But among the comments were two disconcertingly common threads: the propensity to make sense of this horrific gaffe as a result of corporate ignorance, and perhaps more disturbing, as an outcome of relying on Large Language Models for advertising copy.

Countless viewers offered a variation of these comments as an explanation. And who could blame them? The idea of blatantly poking fun at a national tragedy is, to most people, incomprehensible. Add to that the atmosphere in which we find ourselves—of AI relentlessly wriggling into all corners of our lives while still notoriously error-prone and ambiguously nefarious—and this immediate assumption is perfectly understandable.

Starbucks Korea’s parent company seemed to think so, too; a week after the scandal, the corporate risk and management division of Shinsegae Group—the South Korean retail giant that holds a 67.5% controlling stake in Starbucks Korea through its E-Mart affiliate—presented the results of an internal post-mortem.

They found, first and foremost, no conclusive evidence that the marketing staff intended to mock the May 18 Gwangju Uprising or the 1987 torture death of Park Jong-chul. Additionally, the campaign was conceived by five employees, three of whom refused to hand over their personal smartphones for digital forensic imaging, citing privacy rights. Many of the employees interviewed expressed apathy about the issue and an apparent ignorance of Korean history. Shinsegae announced they had turned the matter over to an active police inquiry and promised that if the police uncovered any malicious material, those employees would be instantly terminated.

It was then explained that the materials related to this campaign went through seven levels of approval, including team leaders, directors, and the subsequently fired CEO Sohn Jeong-hyun, before being launched.

Finally, the smoking gun: the marketing team admitted to using generative AI tools to brainstorm marketing captions. According to the audit, when asked for copy relating to the heavy-duty tumbler, already named the “Tank Tumbler,” whatever Large Language Model they were using spat out something about its heft when brought down on a desk. Of course, a fitting name for such a promotion would, perhaps a little uncreatively, be “Tank Day.” On May 18th, of all days.

This explanation is not without its holes. But evidently, the diagnosis of an all-too-common reliance on AI coupled with tsk-tsk-worthy corporate oversight is satisfying enough to much of the global audience. An article on LinkedIn about the scandal explained in moderate depth the historical background and the findings of the internal audit, accepting them as “what was confirmed.” It’s been reposted 26 times, reacted to 1,502 times, and garnered 287 comments from global professionals, none of whom seem substantially aware of Korean business culture or the broader context of this scandal.

“That's a hell of an example of how damaging a lack of cultural understanding can be in communications,” writes a Senior Communications Advisor based in Germany. “The key issue seems to be what you describe as ‘a team of young marketers with no historical literacy, but fluent in algorithms and trend data, using generative AI to brainstorm a campaign’."

Hundreds of Communications Directors, CMOs, CEOs, and even a person who “spent 5 years as Starbucks President of Asia Pacific working with the Shinsegea [sic] team 2001-2006, to build a culturally relevant Starbucks brand experience” echo these sentiments. A shameful amount of cultural ignorance. Disgraceful use of ChatGPT, or something along those lines. A reprehensibly careless group of C-levels. Perfect LinkedIn fodder, by any metric.1

In the article, no additional cultural context is provided or considered. This is probably how its writer failed to mention the overwhelming evidence that this promotion was entirely intentional in its creation, and likely approved with a good deal more knowledge than Shinsegae is letting on. Evidence which is fairly easy to come across with a faculty for the Korean language, an understanding of Korean internet history and culture, and access to the online sites where Korean netizens themselves discuss and diagnose national disgraces such as this one. Perhaps the author did not possess these things; their readers certainly did not. As such, all were easily bamboozled by the lazy half-admissions of a company’s internal risk and management division. And a very nefarious, concerningly widespread para-political movement continues to breed among Korea’s far-right, still undetected in the international spotlight.

Two days after I posted my first video about the scandal, I began working on a follow-up—this time, with more information, both from newly released insights and deeper research into past, related events. Spurred on by a couple of very helpful commenters on my first video who directed me toward the broader cultural context at play, I had spent a day on Korean chat boards, trawling Korean blogs, and speaking to friends to double-check what I had found. It turned out the linchpin of the entire affair was a community I had known about passively for years: Ilbe.

Short for "Ilgan Best,” or “Daily Best,” Ilbe began in 2010 as a fringe archive of DC Inside, Korea’s answer to 4Chan or Reddit. It was initially a simple roundup of the day’s most popular posts, often edgy jokes that had been deleted by moderators. But since it lacked any traditional moderation structure itself, and enforced absolute anonymity among its users, it quickly evolved into an echo chamber of toxicity, not unlike 4Chan or 8Chan. By the mid-2010s, it hosted tens of millions of views a day, fueled heavily by a demographic of frustrated, angry young men.

Like any comparable message board, the topics that are expressed through memes and posts run the gamut from misogynistic, to racist, to borderline psychopathic. The target of Ilbe’s vitriol is often Korean society itself—it is at the core of every anti-feminist movement that springs up in the country, such as the backlash against female Olympian An San in 2021 for having short hair. Yes, that’s really the extent of it. It also grounds itself in a deep hatred of the Jeolla region of Korea, famous for its left-wing, pro-democracy stances throughout modern Korean history. Gwangju, by the way, is in Jeolla.

And finally, Ilbe members revel in the mockery of historical controversies, or outright tragedies; their favorite targets are the suicide of progressive former president Roh Moo-hyun, the Sewol Ferry victims, and—you guessed it—the 1980 Gwangju Uprising.

Their position on the uprising is an exaggerated, meme-ified version of the reprehensible perspective much of Korea’s far-right takes on it: a communist riot, rightfully quelled. Park Jong-chul’s death, and the transparent excuse for it, are all points of ridicule.

Unlike 4Chan and 8Chan, members of Ilbe, and those who hold its views, are not exclusively social outcasts and internet-bound recluses. Members are embedded throughout above-ground Korean society, many working normal 9-5 jobs before returning home and expressing their true selves online. The extent to which Ilbe’s tentacles twist through Korean corporations and government enables one of the website’s trademark activities: 방송 인증, or “broadcast proof.”

Members compete to see where they can sneak the site’s far-right ideology and symbols into plain view, often through memes and childish humor. Television shows, corporate logos, brand communications, and government messages have all fallen victim at one point or another. Below are three examples.

Beyond blatant image alterations making their way onto television, official social media accounts, and sports stadiums, many of the covert “broadcast proofs” are built around words or phrases that either originated on the site or have been co-opted as dog whistles. “Bang! on the desk” is one such commonly used and mocked phrase.

Given Ilbe members’ abilities to land positions at mainstream corporate offices, and then use those positions to competitively disseminate offensive memes, it’s not difficult to imagine that Starbucks was a similar inside job. But a number of strikingly similar cases make it practically undeniable.

In 2019, online retail giant Musinsa posted an advertisement about quick-drying socks on Instagram. The main copy: “Bang! On the desk, and it’s dry.”

The backlash was immediate and severe. Musinsa’s management promptly removed the ad, and restructured their entire internal compliance review as a result.

Several years prior, on an episode of the enduringly popular, family-friendly variety show Running Man, on-screen graphics featured similar verbiage, clearly a call-out to the Park Jong-chul incident.

So, no, it’s not likely that AI is to blame for what is an established culture of public pranks aimed at making light of a specific national tragedy. And given this background, it’s just as unlikely that the staff at Starbucks were as ignorant of Korean history as the company claimed. But even if one or a few members of Korea’s marketing team were Ilbe members by night, surely the rest of the scandal can be chalked up to gross corporate oversight, right?2

Maybe not. Corporate oversight is, like the other findings to come out of the internal audit, generally treated as a passive form of ignorance rather than malicious intent—and one solved by opaque corporate training sessions, restructurings, and apologies, no less. It would be worth believing, though, if we didn’t know the politics of the chain of command that supposedly let the Tank Day promotion slip through the cracks.

We can begin at the top with Chung Yong-jin, the Chairman of Shinsegae Group who is notoriously active on social media, and quite public about his deeply conservative views. He most famously ignited a national uproar by repeatedly posting the far-right political slogan “멸공” (Myeol-gong), or “crush communism,” on his personal Instagram. What may seem like a bit of awkwardly outdated McCarthyism is, in Korea, the exact rhetoric used by the far-right and communities like Ilbe to attack progressives and, crucially, to delegitimize the Gwangju Democratization Movement.

In Korean Chaebol culture—the kind that a massive conglomerate like Shinsegae exemplifies—the worldview of the executive is the standard. Unimaginable though it may be that the head of one of the country’s largest companies would endeavor to “troll the libs” with a tumbler promotion, it’s less difficult to imagine those in the chain of command hesitating to speak out, if they did in fact disagree with the politics behind the promotion. It is also very plausible to conceive of that company’s internal risk and management division diverting attention away from the real source of the scandal—one which the chairman of the company seems likely to have ideological alignment with.

Thus, the easier choice is to default to the explanations most global spectators have arrived at themselves: AI, laziness, incompetence. A road to brand recovery paved with profuse apologies, trainings, restructurings, and time. Those unaware of the toxic communities that infiltrate Korean society to spread vicious rhetoric and offensive jokes cannot be blamed for their ignorance; media written on the scandal by purported authorities, on the other hand, probably should be. Regardless, as long as misdiagnoses continue to spread amongst those with only a cursory interest in and understanding of Korea’s business culture, the darker core of the problem will continue to operate in plain sight, and we can only wait until the next hyper-public, ultra-offensive shitpost.

I had started my TikTok account on the off chance that it could become an avenue for income while figuring out the rest of my life in Bangkok. By the time I was preparing to move from Korea (now very much the base and subject of my content) to Thailand, what had seemed like a harebrained scheme, especially for someone like me, was now looking strangely viable. Abandoning the scramble of searching for more stable work was still out of sight, and not very much of interest anyway. But I was sitting on a surprisingly reliable format for generating at least a couple of tens of thousands of views per video and netting over a thousand bucks a month. A small amount of money that goes a long way in Bangkok.

Surely my approach of showing up at genuine, locally beloved restaurants and covertly filming whatever I was eating, then going home and laying a simple voiceover track over it, would work as well in Bangkok as it had in Seoul. Thirty minutes of “work” a day, tops. And if the sudden shift would be too jarring for my followers, I had a hefty backlog of Korea footage. I explained as much in a rare, front-facing video. Something along the lines of, “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to change.”

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The platform didn’t agree. As soon as I was out of Korea, my Korea videos—in the exact same style that rarely fell below 50,000 views—were struggling to crawl up to 2,000. Videos of local spots I was discovering in Bangkok were doing even worse. I was excited about finding a delicious, unknown, $2-a-plate braised pork foot and rice shop in my neighborhood—why wasn’t anyone else?

I panicked. I kept shuffling between Korea videos and Bangkok videos, tweaking the style, the language, the targeting. Nothing was working. I consulted a number of large language models, which confidently explained to me what the issue was and how to solve it. Following their advice resulted in awkward, clumsy videos that didn’t feel like me (surprise), and performed no better. This was only the latest step in my growing understanding of how counterintuitively limited AI’s ability to assist with content creation was, something I discussed last week in Structural Integrity:

I copied other creators I saw making lifestyle vlogs and food videos in Bangkok. I was both eager to show off my new life and aware that views from Thai accounts don’t count toward income on TikTok—but that’s for another piece. All I knew was that I had to pivot. I had unwittingly found myself in a period of trial and error, and so far, all I was turning up was error.

As I traversed Bangkok, becoming acquainted with the city and its rhythms, I was unsurprised to see the influence of recent Korean trends. I knew the kind of one-sided interest Thai consumers had in Korea and its popular culture, and that local businesses were smart enough to capitalize on it. So it was no surprise that I came across “Dubai Chewy Cookies,” a massive dessert trend that had come and gone in Korea a few months earlier, everywhere in Thailand—from small cafés to large department stores.

And at some point, I began thinking about these small, cocoa-dusted balls of kadaif, pistachio paste, and marshmallow. In my eight years in Seoul, I had seen countless trendy food items enter the market with a bang, as though they would make a lasting impact on the country’s food culture as a whole, only to fizzle out with a whimper a month or two later. And as a foreigner with a background in the F&B business in Seoul, I had some thoughts about it.

So, somehow, I was compelled to sit down on the couch in my condominium, prop my phone up against a heavy tumbler, and speak to the camera. I had a loose idea of the points I wanted to hit—there was no script. I talked about how these desserts were emblematic of the way Korean business culture took no issue with copycats, prioritizing proof of concept over innovation. It required a lot of chopping in the editing stage to make it cohesive and bring it in under four minutes.

I used TikTok’s native editor to replace the background of my drab apartment with photos I found of the cookies, along with any other examples that were relevant in the moment. I even plugged my own bar at the end. I had no plan, and no idea what I was doing. It was simply a concept I was passionate about, and wanted to get off my chest.

The video hit 20,000 views on the first day, and 40,000 the next. Not huge numbers by TikTok standards, but far better than I had been getting with videos about Burmese chicken biryani and Dairy Queen mango sticky rice ice cream. I was on to something. I doubled down and began discussing everything I knew about Korean business culture, on my sofa, with stock images in the background. It kept working. People were engaging, saving and reposting, and getting into debates in the comments. I continued to intersperse these videos with recycled Korean footage—it wasn’t a fluke. Those weren’t doing it. These were.

Then I remembered some interesting, outrageous information a friend had told me about Korean saunas—specifically, the difference between the men’s and women’s sides. I’d never had a video blow up like that one. Today, a couple of months later, it’s sitting at 2.8 million views, and I’ve made about $1,500 from it.

The business angle was useful for plugging my more professional services off the platform, but nothing was as effective as the obscure facets of Korean culture I’d picked up by virtue of my fluency in the language and my relationships with Koreans who were willing to let me in on the full experience. I leaned into this approach fully. I experimented with pacing, topics, and scripting. Over time, I learned how to craft a hook that drew viewers in, whether they had a preexisting interest in Korean culture or not. I began to understand how to keep people engaged, and get my point across in an organized, fairly impartial way that would still lead to impassioned back-and-forth in the comments.

Over the last few months, I’ve continued refining this approach, discussing food history, current events, and scandalous or salacious aspects of Korean culture not easily accessible to outsiders, now made accessible by one. I was still putting these pieces together in late March, when I wrote and posted the first installment of this series, ending with the note that I had, at the time, 21,636 followers. Today, almost exactly three months later, I have 57,773.

Some months I make pretty good money; others I turn up a couple hundred bucks. I rarely get anything resembling a brand deal, and occasionally receive inquiries about my freelance services helping businesses enter the Korean market. My understanding of TikTok continues to grow, and my cynicism about it continues to wane. I still need a more stable job, and have no idea what comes next, other than more followers. And what that means, I’m still not sure.

It can’t.

Large Language Models were a major player in the beginning of my TikTok journey. With access to all the information in the world, delivered in a pleasing, concise, sycophantic package as if from the words of a young and eager personal assistant, surely optimizing content should be a breeze.

I looked to ChatGPT in the beginning to understand how, and what, I should post. I continued to probe it for tips when I felt stifled by view counts or follower metrics. When I found myself needing to pivot to survive, I spent days meticulously compiling analytics about my videos, and pressing Gemini (I’d given up on ChatGPT at this point) for a comprehensive read of the patterns, the successes and failures, a complete distillation of what I should be doing to grow, earn, and succeed.

At every point, AI failed, and tempting though it is to trust it (after all, these LLMs and the TikTok algorithm should be of the same tribe, right?), it will fail you too. Here’s are the reasons why:

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When my simple, sloppily cobbled-together video about a cheap, no-frills, ultra-fresh sushi stall in a market in Taipei went a little bit viral, I could only guess what had made it different from the previous ten videos that had ended up as little more than personal travel diary entries. It would take a year of continued experimentation and analysis for me to find the answer—or rather, answers—which I examined in technical detail in last week’s Structural Integrity piece:

But at the time, the success itself mattered less than what it represented: the starting point of a hunt for patterns. As I continued uploading a mix of rehashed scenes from my Taipei trip alongside daily videos about my life in Seoul—usually food-related—I finally began to learn, firsthand, what the people and programming of TikTok seemed to like.

I couldn’t fly back to Taipei and find more budget sushi counters; at least not yet. Instead, I began noticing occasional spikes in viewership among the videos I was posting every day. I had developed a surprising comfort with pulling out my camera whenever I was having lunch, dinner, coffee, or shopping in Seoul—which was often.

A few days after the sushi video, one I’d made about a cold soybean noodle restaurant across the street from my house did pretty well. A video about a bargain all-you-can-eat Korean buffet in Gangnam that I was certain would blow up instead flopped. So did one about cheap Taipei street snacks. But an honest (read: negative) review of McDonald’s newly released hot dog? Eighty thousand views in a day, only a week after my first taste of virality.

The pieces were starting to come together. Overall, Taiwan wasn’t doing it. People didn’t want travel content—they wanted Korea, and the parts of Korea that were both outrageous and eye-catching, the parts no one else was talking about.

I had spent eight years developing a network, community, and body of knowledge that most foreigners in the country, for one reason or another, didn’t have access to. Throughout that time, I had wanted to share it with the world somehow, without any certainty that the world even wanted it. Now I had found the platform, and learned that there was, indeed, substantial demand.

My phone quickly became a bank of three-second clips of B-roll: panning shots of storefronts, exterior signage, and local dishes from every conceivable angle. I learned how to extract content from anything in my daily life: going to the market, planning the reopening of my record bar, ordering a pizza.

Not everything worked, and through both successes and failures my understanding continued to grow. Whenever I’d accumulate enough successful videos to develop a bit of hubris and think I’d cracked the system, the platform would bring me crashing back to earth with a couple hundred views. The failures were as useful as the successes, if not more so. And yet, over the span of several months, I had developed a pattern that worked.

I’d collect footage as I lived my life as a foreigner in his eighth year in Korea—running a business, DJing, eating. Doing what I had always done, just with an audience. Then I’d spend thirty minutes a day cutting and pasting the clips into a one-minute video, finishing it with a simple, semi-linear narration and the occasional bit of explanatory text.

I hit one thousand followers, then several thousand. As my cocktail bar reopened in September, we’d consistently have at least one party a day who had found us through my videos, in which I frequently referred to the bar—a conspicuous plug that was surprisingly effective. At one point, I was stopped by a traveler in Mangwon Market who recognized me as “Bones” and told me he was a fan.

As much as my goals throughout all of this included promoting my bar and spreading the word about local, hard-to-find businesses in Seoul, the overarching aim was—believe it or not—money. Since the beginning, I had hoped to establish a low-effort financial safety net that could carry me through at least the first few months of my move to Bangkok in 2026, for which I had no concrete plans for work or income.

Making money from social media—something that had felt tantalizingly possible ever since my influencer marketing days, yet undeniably unlikely given my shortcomings when it came to understanding or even enjoying social media itself—became a reality about six months after starting Words With Bones. This was when I hit ten thousand followers, the threshold required to qualify for TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program, which pays creators a cut—and not a particularly generous one—of the ad revenue generated by their videos.

The money was far from substantial at first. A couple of bucks a day, if that. Far more significant was the potential I now saw—that I might actually pull this off. Fifty dollars in the first month turned into fifteen hundred the next. I was gaining about a hundred followers a day. I had my first video hit one million views.

And then, in January 2026, I moved to Bangkok, and once again, everything changed.

Most conventional TikTok wisdom for growing creators boils down to a single principle: find something that works, and then keep doing that.

Great! Except the platform doesn’t tell you what specifically about your video worked (or didn’t), or why it worked (or didn’t). So a successful video is hardly more helpful than the unsuccessful ones. The boilerplate advice given by “growth gurus” fails to explain that much of cracking this code comes down to the ability to conduct organized experiments with your own content and isolate the factors conducive to optimization.

And this is a much more daunting task than it may seem; some of the things the algorithm reacts to include whether text is on screen, the use of words that have been flagged or blacklisted (this “list” is not officially disclosed anywhere), pacing, lighting, sound quality, background, the amount of time one’s face is visible in frame (if at all), the amount of time one’s body is visible in frame (if at all), the amount of engagement a video gets, the type of engagement it gets… there are countless factors to take into account when determining why a single video succeeds or doesn’t. The ability of a true “creator” is to develop an overall holistic sense, based on a background awareness of each of these variables, of what will work and what won’t.

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It had been two weeks since I’d returned from my Taipei trip. I’d had a great time, eaten a lot of good food, and taken a lot of very short, sporadic videos. Back in Seoul, I continued cobbling these clips together as an afterthought, neither deterred by the lack of traction my videos were getting nor encouraged by anything other than the desire for routine.

I was happy with the videos: the way I had shot them and edited them, the way they captured moments of my trip. If nothing else, this could be an album for my own memories, I thought, open to whoever else might want to thumb through it, for whatever reason.

On one hand, I was perplexed by why videos of hyperlocal experiences I had dug out from the city myself—late-night street dumplings, $1.00 beer in the back of a factory—were so quiet. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d want to see as I scrolled through these social media apps. Was I alone?

On the other hand, it made perfect sense to me. Quality, demand, concept—all of these aside, how many millions of other “creators” were there on this platform? How many tens of millions—hundreds of millions?—of videos were being uploaded daily? As I began to understand the magnitude of the odds against me, the lottery felt like a more certain way to establish a financial future.

On one of my first days in Taipei, as I wandered around the historic Datong district, I—as happens fairly often, at least to me—needed to use the restroom. So I ducked into a large indoor market that was clearly a buzzing center of the neighborhood, but more importantly to me in the moment, seemed like it must have a toilet. And it did.

But on my way through the market, I found myself weaving through a line of mostly locals that wrapped around stalls and snaked out the entrance of the building. Relieved and refreshed, I spent a little more time investigating the endpoint of this line as I headed back toward the street. Unlike the cute bubble tea cafes or trendy brunch spots that normally seemed to command hour-long wait times in this city, the destination for these hundreds of people was apparently a very humble, but very busy, sushi restaurant. I saved the decades-old fish counter to my Google Maps and resolved to return for lunch sometime if I had enough money left over by the end of the trip, and became sick of Taiwanese food.

Neither of which seemed likely—I was enjoying an endless barrage of salty, umami-heavy delicacies rounded out with sweet beverages and cheap (again, $1.00) beers throughout the trip. But on the last day, my curiosity about this local, unpretentious yet evidently renowned sushi shop couldn’t be contained. I hurried back to Dadaocheng and found a place in the long line.

As it quickly shortened, a staff member approached me and clarified that I was alone. Yes. This allowed me to be brought, like a lonely VIP, to the very front, seated at a single stool right in front of the frenetic sushi bar. I was handed a Mandarin menu—the only one they had (an excellent sign)—and translated it with my phone. Several sushi sets were available, all in the seven-to-fourteen-dollar range. At the bottom of the menu was the single rule of the house: you must spend at least 280 NTD—at the time of writing, $8.88 USD.

I ordered a plate of mixed nigiri, an everyman’s omakase of whatever was fresh that day, and a piece of braised mackerel to hit the minimum. As I waited, I scanned the glass showcase in front of me; piles of fat shrimp, small soy-soaked whole fish, and slabs of tuna remained in stacks for mere seconds before one of the many hands behind the sprawling display snatched one up and began preparing something for the seemingly endless horde of diners.

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Somehow, it was divined to me that my meal included a free miso soup, but that I had to get on a separate line to receive it myself. I waited on the short line as one of the several employees ladled out a chunky stew into melamine bowls and handed them to each patron. I got mine, then returned to my courtside seat and investigated it further. This was no ordinary miso soup. It more closely resembled something local: a hearty broth saturated with chunks of fresh tofu, fish cakes of all shapes and sizes, and scraps of tuna. Things just kept getting better here.

My nigiri appeared: eight thick slabs of various fish topped, with no sense of precision or artistry, atop lumps of vinegared rice. It will probably not surprise you to hear that each piece was phenomenally fresh and delicious. At some point the mackerel surfaced, and it too was incredible. I was in heaven.

Anyone with any knowledge of short-form video will tell you: the “hook” is everything. You have one to two seconds to snag the attention of a person who probably doesn’t have very much of it to spare before they thumb your video up and into oblivion. There are several approaches seasoned creators use to keep you glued, and one of the most intuitive yet effective is to sample a piece of information you’ll deliver later in the video, framed as a subjective opinion presented with superlative confidence.

For a deeper dive into how to craft timelessly effective hooks (and why they work), check out the piece below in Structural Integrity:

Not thinking much of it, I started my video about Wanlong Raw Fish Shop with one such statement: “The best non-Taiwanese food to eat in Taiwan is cheap sushi.” Did I believe this? I’m not sure. But though I didn’t eat much non-Taiwanese food during my time there, I found this meal at once remarkably good and simultaneously local at its core, despite technically being Japanese food.

The ten videos I had posted prior to this one, since starting “Words With Bones,” averaged about 1,000 views in the first day. By TikTok standards, rookie numbers. Yet after posting my cheap sushi review, I would periodically check in to see the view count climbing in leaps and bounds rather than small hops. By the end of the first day, it had accrued 25,000 views. Within a few more days, it hit 100K.

And the comments! My other videos would get one or two, if lucky. But every couple of minutes, someone would chime in about how good the food looked, or how they were adding it to their list for their own Taipei trip. And then there were those explaining how sushi isn’t actually Japanese, or how I should be ashamed for eating any non-Taiwanese food in Taiwan—and then, my personal favorite, locals excoriating me for blowing up their secret spot.

So this is what it felt like. This is what it was to have a video that people were actually seeing, and thinking about, and reacting to. The 1,500 views on my Medium story about Kitakyushu that, a month earlier, had washed me in a flood of dopamine now did nothing to move the needle.

It took me longer to learn what about that video was successful. What I learned in that moment, however, was just what made TikTok so attractive—and dangerous—and that, for better or for worse, there was potential for me here.

It generally takes much less effort to produce a one-minute video than a thirty-minute one. The tradeoff is your audience—a viewer willing to watch thirty minutes of content is generally forgiving with their attention span, invested in and loyal to whatever you have to say. Not so for the millions of people who scroll through TikTok and Reels every day; the battle for their attention, of which there isn’t much to begin with, is at the heart of short-form content strategy and what most creators struggle with.

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It surprised me how easy it was—as I ducked out of the plane and the flight attendants bade me farewell cheerfully and automatically, I snapped a covert three seconds of footage of the people in front of me crossing onto the jetway. Then, a bit further onto the bridge, another three seconds. In the airport now, I pointed my camera at whatever would help me tell the story I had vaguely outlined in my head, but didn’t yet know the plot of: a cute poster warning about the efficacy of Taiwanese drug-sniffing dogs. Grabbing my worn duffel bag off the luggage carousel. Tapping the transit card I had just bought to enter the train that would take me into the center of the city.

I had the template, and from what I knew, it was one that worked. What I was determined to test on this first day in Taipei was whether I could make it work for me. Talking into a camera on the street was out of the question. Selfie sticks or Osmo 360 whatevers, even more so. But this—the quick, inconspicuous nicking of a few seconds here and there from whatever was playing out in front of me—was jarringly natural. It was hardly different from the photos I’d be taking for my own memories on such a trip anyway.

I had arrived in the morning, and by the time I was at Taipei Main Station, I still had a few hours to kill before check-in. I shoved my luggage into a coin locker in the massive, frigid train hall and ventured out onto the street. Flitting through small alleys, directionless and hungry, I eventually ducked into a nondescript barbecue meat-and-rice shop. Every moment—the locker door shutting, the escalator cresting onto the street, a roast chicken dunked into a tub of glossy sauce—was collected. I felt like a naturalist trawling a forest with a Petri dish and a pair of forceps. The material in front of me was open and endless; I could take whatever I needed now, clean it up in editing later, and reap the rewards… sometime. Maybe.

What made this even easier was my obsessive tendency, with camera or without, to pack a first day in a new city full of moments that would acquaint me with it. The amount of new food I would consume would be unrelated to my actual hunger at any given moment; where I would walk would be entirely unaffected by how tired I was or how sore my feet were.

A full account of my first three days is here on Substack, if you’re interested. What these written pieces don’t include is the time I spent in my strangely laid-out rented room trying to figure out how to make new TikTok and Instagram accounts with a Taiwanese eSIM, and then how to use CapCut to overlay the tightly paced, semi-chronological forty-second video I had edited together with some appropriate-seeming Taiwanese indie music and text mimicking, shamelessly, this video.

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From my “research,” I knew a couple of things: I knew I had to post every day. I knew my videos had to be under one minute long, and each clip in them no longer than two seconds. I knew making lists (“Top 3 Cheap Lunch Spots in Taipei”), as if I were an authority rather than a first-time visitor, would boost that sweet, coveted engagement.

I now know that these oft-quoted axioms are devoid of nuanced understanding at best and flat-out false at worst; read more about what advice creators should ignore, and what they should be doing instead, in the piece below:

What I knew from experience, both in social media and in life, on the other hand, would prove true: my first few videos would garner a couple hundred views each; the biggest hindrance to any kind of returns I might see would be a lack of consistency; and nothing notable would happen anytime soon.

Therefore, undeterred by the lackluster performance of my first video, my own rendition of “First 24 Hours in Taipei,” I continued dutifully recording copious footage of everything I did, saw, and ate in the city during the day, then returning to the hotel at night to clumsily edit the short clips into the kinds of videos I thought TikTok users might like to see, and that felt natural for me to make: “3 Vintage Shops in Taipei;” “How to Spend a Rainy Day in Taipei;” “Taiwanese Breakfast” (a personal favorite of mine, despite its current 1,781 views).

I knew it would take time to develop a style, or even a theme, and that was fine. In the meantime, I enjoyed hunting for moments to collect, and then thinking about how I could piece them together to tell a tiny, unimportant story—as much an album of my trip for my own sake as anything else. I continued playing with fonts and editing flourishes, and becoming more comfortable filming myself. And as much as I was having fun learning a platform I had been working with in ignorance for years, I began to wonder when—if—I would ever see any traction. By the second week, the doubts I had harbored for as long as I could remember started to creep back in; maybe a chronically offline thirty-year-old bar owner living in Korea just isn’t cut out for TikTok. And then my eleventh video went viral.

When I began a TikTok account with the intention of actually growing a following and maybe even making money, I found myself embarrassingly unaware of how to start, given that I had worked in social media-related marketing for the seven years prior. So I took to Google, and ChatGPT, and then TikTok itself, for advice on how to make videos that people—and the platform—might like.

The key axioms, a ubiquitous handful of “best practices,” seemed logical at the time, and I adhered to them. Now, a year later, I’ve come to understand that they are often devoid of a nuanced understanding of the algorithm and viewer psychology, and while not entirely invalid, may actually inhibit the creative experimentation necessary for a new creator to find their voice.

Here is a list of some of the “must-do’s” I came across at the beginning of my journey, and why, in many cases, they are best ignored.

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When I moved to Bangkok a little under four months ago, I had a number of hypotheses about the direction my writing would follow. Setting up my bar and subsequently getting my laptop stolen at the end of 2025, coupled with a dizzying mix of schedule adjustment, expatriation prep, and good old-fashioned procrastination, had led to a regrettable hiatus from writing. I looked forward to a drastic refresh upon swapping grey, bleak Seoul winter for palm tree–studded, lime- and coconut-scented perpetual Thai summer—and with that refresh, a jolt of energy compelling me to pour all of the thoughts, experiences, and lessons that came with such a transition into my once-again-weekly newsletter.

The refresh, to some extent, happened. The motivation to write, on the other hand, kind of didn’t. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to write, but rather that the topic I had arbitrarily assigned myself wasn’t pulling me. I don’t talk with many writers about writing, as I still don’t consider myself one of their ilk (maybe one day), so I wonder if they, too, have this problem: if the topic doesn’t light a spark, the engine doesn’t start. I’d imagine the ones who actually make money from their writing are much better at mitigating such an issue—if there is one.

I, on the other hand, make money from stupid little videos on TikTok. That’s been the case since late 2025, a position in which I never, ever expected to find myself. But here we are. And the move to Thailand simultaneously increased my dependence on income from this platform while also throwing a rock in the gears—as my geolocation changed, my audience changed, and video formats that once netted me substantial views were now floundering. My payouts were shrinking as a result of the Oracle acquisition. I won’t bog you down with the details—rather, I have a new section for that. That’s what this piece is designed to let you know, when we finally get around to it. This is just a bit of foreshadowing, I guess.

Anyway, I found myself in an extended period of rethinking what I had previously believed to be a solid grasp of the platform and how the algorithm worked. It turned out I had overestimated my mastery of the system and was, in a way, back at square one. To make a long story a little less long, I figured it out, pivoted my content, and learned a lot—continue to learn a lot—along the way. And as someone who hated influencer marketing when I used to work in influencer marketing, I now found myself wanting to write about it.

So I began a series, still ongoing, describing how I became a person who makes money from TikTok videos—very much not the type suited to traditional notions of influencerdom. I’m enjoying recounting in narrative detail how this all happened, but I realized the story was both incomplete without a look into the mechanics of the platform, and a bit masturbatory if it didn’t share the information I’ve gleaned through the process. So, for those interested in the metrics, analytics, and takeaways, I’ve created a new section: Structural Integrity.

I kicked it off with a dissection of the single TikTok video I can credit with beginning my own journey on the platform. Going forward, I intend to look more at my own videos, providing transparent analytics and learnings with all of the data I have access to, as well as my growing understanding of why some things worked and others didn’t. With these posts, I aim not only to round out the story of learning the platform, but also to provide actionable insight for those on a similar journey—or at least considering starting one.

Please check out Structural Integrity if you’re interested in this kind of thing—it will be updated at a similar pace as my main pieces, so roughly once a week.

Thank you all for your support thus far, and I look forward to sharing more with you.

A tall, lanky white man in a striped long-sleeve shirt and jean shorts stands across the street. Behind him is a storefront, fully open but barricaded against the flow of passersby with an array of stainless steel counters and showcases — the kind on which a massive segment of the food industry across Asia depends. Above him is a white menu board with neat columns of Chinese characters, footed by indistinct prices and headed by faded color photos of various dumplings and steamed offerings.

The man says something politely to the woman behind the counter, probably a formulaic expression of gratitude. This happens in a split second. Cut to the next scene: the same, static setting, but the man is facing us, and he takes a bite out of something wrapped in white paper. This moment, too, lasts a bit shy of one second. Next scene: we’re still here. Nothing has moved except the shop owner, the motorcycles occasionally streaking across the foreground, and the man, who now exits frame stage right. Above the shop menu, but below its worn red and white sign, appear two lines of text:

It was a day before my departure to Taipei, and I had not only planned nothing — I knew nothing. I had consulted with a Large Language Model about the best neighborhoods to book a hotel in, which had been nominally helpful. Beyond that, I had no connections in or information about the city where I was about to spend a week, by myself. And I was fine with that; I liked allowing a city to reveal itself to me as I surveyed it by foot, and I disliked the burden of feeling like there were things I needed to know, or must experience — often diversions from the normal rhythms of a place, to me the most charming part.

And yet, as I packed a couple of t-shirts and pants and basic toiletries, the anticipation of breaking away from a hectic, unpredictable schedule to go to a new, hectic, unpredictable city (we all have our patterns) grew on me. I was excited to visit this place that I had been curious about for years, on my own time and at my own whims. And out of this giddy curiosity, I suddenly wanted to know more. It was the same feeling you felt as a child when you were bought a new toy and told you couldn’t play with it until you got home — when, on the way home, you slid a finger into the bag, below the cardboard lip of the box, and cracked it open just to see what was inside. You already knew what you’d bought, and you knew you’d get to enjoy it in its entirety soon enough. But for that moment, a simple scan of what would be to come, an intentional stoking of anticipation, was a both tantalizing and innocent indulgence.

This was the first trip I’d taken in recent memory where I didn’t have anyone on the ground to prod for their favorite street food spots, their late night haunts, their places to get away from everything and everyone and be alone together with their city.

In Shanghai, a group of DJs, skaters, and drug dealers had taken me around the city to the record stores where they had done the best digging, the bars where they would get free shots, the dumpling spots that wouldn’t have a line and were far and away better than the ones that did; in Tokyo, I’d put feelers out to a handful of friends, both local and otherwise, who collaboratively populated for me a list of places to go and things to do, but not the places everyone goes and not the things everyone does; in Bangkok, it took a simple “hey man, what you up to tn?” to a friend to find myself included in a dizzyingly large, profoundly affable gathering until morning.

In Taipei, I knew no one, nowhere, and nothing. And I had no way of knowing. So I did the first in what would end up being a long series of uncharacteristic things: I took to social media. I opened instagram and my fingers, by a shameful display of muscle memory, navigated us over to the search bar, where I typed in “Taipei,” or “Taipei things to do,” or “best in Taipei,” something like that.

I sifted through a handful of thumbnails shoving colorful, gaudy desserts at me, boyfriend-taken videos of girls exploring the kinds of shops and cafes I’d never want to go to, and clearly sponsored posts about restaurants and custom perfume experiences I’d never want to have. For an eleventh year running, what I knew to be true held strong — these platforms weren’t for me, we didn’t speak the same language, have the same interests, want the same things. And that was fine by me.

And then, just short of giving up, I came across a thumbnail of a man, about my age, standing in front of a local dumpling shop, the kind of shop I’d eat dumplings at. The first three scenes blitzed by faster than I could process. Suddenly, we had gone from the shop on the street to a baggage claim line. Simple white text in the center of the frame read “5:35 am.” Below that, in the same font, of the same size, read another line: “landed early in the morning.” A fraction of a second passes, and we’re now close up on the cameraman’s hand receiving a subway card from a window. The text in the center now reads “5:36 am.” Cut to the card tapping on a Taiwanese turnstile, with a bureaucratic beep. 5:37 am. The doors of a subway open. 5:55 am. The man from before sits on a subway seat with someone who is probably his girlfriend, both looking out the window. Who’s filming this now? 6:32 am. The text below has changed. “About an hour commute.” Three successive cuts — one shot by the man, one by his girlfriend, one by a tripod, or something, show the process of the two alighting from the train station. Interior shot of man entering the hotel. 7:32 am. “Check into the Kimpton.” We are ten seconds into the video.

The remaining thirty seconds of it follow the same format. Fraction-of-a-second shots, mostly point-of-view, tell the story of the man and his girlfriend eating dan bing and soy milk near their hotel; taking a nap; eating ramen for dinner; visiting a night market; eating a bun stuffed with a scoop of vanilla ice cream; walking back to the hotel in the rain. Each cut is timestamped, and occasionally marked with a brief, blandly explanatory subtitle:

“first Taiwanese breakfast!”

“Jetlag took us out.”

“Had to get an ice cream sando.”

The video was frenetic, its contents mundane. A couple arrived in Taipei, took a shower, ate a few things, took a nap in the middle, and then called it a night around 10:30. But the speed at which moments of this were presented, absent of filters, devoid of any attempt to beautify the scenes to which they opened windows for a single, brief glimpse, made me feel as if I had seen much of a city in forty seconds. He rarely faced the camera, and never spoke to it. There was no interviewing a noodle shop owner about how many bowls a day she sells. There was no list, no recommendations — in fact, no real information given at all. Instead, the process of drinking a paper cup of fresh soy milk was broken down into five shots: getting the cup, setting the cup down, jamming a straw through its plastic seal, drinking the soy milk, reacting to the soy milk. It had more intense pacing than a John Woo film, with as much action as a slow day on a local news channel. On the right of the frame, I could see that the video had 26,400 likes, 239 comments, and 3,809 shares. I now know why.

When the man began his day with a local breakfast, I was for the first time optimistic that I might have found a “creator” whose tastes aligned with mine, who traveled the same way I liked to, whose discoveries in this city might form a loose guide for my own. Yet as milquetoast zillenial captions continued to run on screen, I began to feel the gap between myself and this person widen. By the end of the video, as he capped his first night off in Taiwan with Japanese food (blasphemy in my book), I knew we were not the same, and suspected this man’s contents would be of less value to me than I hoped.

This was confirmed when I scrolled through a few of his other videos; hoping to find more daily breakdowns of his trip to Taipei from which I could leech off information for myself, I instead came across countless videos of him cleaning his generic, corporate-chic Chicago loft, complete with a backlit TV screen always displaying a frame from an anime or associated video game. Daily reset. Bedding refresh ☁️. Small home additions for big VIBES.

This was a person who made well-produced, quick-cut videos of himself moving and adding things to his house, and then brought the contents along as he occasionally went on business trips around the world for whatever his company job was. We were nothing alike, and for the most part, his videos were useless to me. But as I replayed the dizzying Taipei montage, I came to understand something I had never understood before. I learned nothing about where to go, what to do, or anything about Taipei, for that matter. Rather, I learned that anyone could record snippets of their life in short, discreet bursts — conspicuous camerawork, minimal editing, a couple lines of added text. None of the things I hated about what I understood social media to be; just a raw, concise but exhaustive presentation of a day of travel. And for the first time, I finished a TikTok video thinking, “I could do that.”

The video that made me start TikTok was this simple, forty-second travel "vlog” by drewfromladue. When I first saw it, I knew nothing about TikTok optimization, and therefore had no understanding of why it was successful, how it could be better, and what I could take away from it. Understanding TikTok strategy and, on a basic level, the TikTok algorithm, is an undulating mix of art and science. Yet having grown my own channel over the past year and spent time analyzing both my own and others’ videos in the interest of driving performance, I now have a number of retroactive takeaways about this video — some positive, some negative.

To understand this video holistically, we first need to build a comprehensive body of information about the creator.

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