Willingness to embrace setbacks
Willingness to embrace setbacks
NAVER I Design I Seo Myong-won
Seo Myong-won started his career as a product GUI designer and joined NAVER as a UI/UX designer. Although Myong-won enjoyed his work as a product designer, it wasn’t enough for him because the product design had to change depending on the consumer’s ability to pay. But information, unlike products, can be shared by and to anyone and everyone. This is why he likes working at NAVER. Taking pride in his work, Myong-won has been in charge of various projects related to search, which is deemed key to NAVER’s services, for the past 10 years. The projects range from renewing integrated search, to content design for large events like the Olympics, renewing NAVER’s map service, AI voice search, and place search. He now leads a small team of 20 members and is working on a new global project called Vintage City (VC), which has been first launched in Japan. “99% of NAVER’s global projects end up in failure. I believe it is even more difficult because NAVER has weak brand awareness in markets other than Korea.” Although Myong-won acknowledges the possibility of failure, he will persist in pushing forward with plans for expanding NAVER’s operation into foreign countries including the US and Europe. 1% is just all he needs.
Tell us about your project, “Vintage City”.
We first started Vintage City with one goal in mind: let’s jump into the booming resale market. Vintage City curates vintage goods and shops in Tokyo and offers them to our users. Vintage shops are recommended to users who might have interest in them. In short, Vintage City is “Japan’s first Vintage Fashion EC community” where anyone can buy and sell their vintage goods.
Why vintage?
I was watching Youtube the other day, and an influencer posted a video about her vintage watch that she bought while traveling in New York. People started writing comments on her video, asking where she bought the watch. Come to think of it, people I know always looked for nice vintage shops whenever they visited Tokyo, and I have had the same experience when I was traveling in Berlin. This thought has led me and my team to gather information on vintage shops around the world. We thought, since there are so many vintage shops worldwide, we might be able to do something by gathering all the related information. Japan is the world’s third largest fashion market, but there wasn’t a single C2C platform for clothing and accessories. It was quite surprising that there was no single platform providing information on vintage goods, given that Japanese vintage fashion has a long history. I remember that we were really excited when we first came up with this idea. We are not only Japan’s first, but we are in fact, the world’s first C2C platform for vintage goods. Let’s be honest. There is nothing new in the platform business.
What was different this time?
It wasn’t easy to prepare, launch and operate a project, and add payment functions to the service because I have been working as a designer for the past 14 years. Many expressed concerns over our project launch when we first organized the team. So we reached out for support to relevant teams for commerce, contract and legal advice whenever we felt anxious. Actually, we never stopped asking for advice. For me, it is important to launch projects and achieve amazing results, but it is more important to build trust within our team.
Apart from Vintage City, I’ve heard that you have led the launch of many new projects from scratch. Are you a person who prefers change?
Some might mistaken me as one who prefers change, but in most cases, it’s because I feel responsible for it. It isn’t easy for a person like me to leave a project behind, which I’ve worked day and night, and start a whole new project. But whenever I had a chance, I didn’t hesitate because I was able to grow when I did my utmost to get the job done, whether it was significant or not, ever since I was a junior staff. I really admire Kim Jun-koo, the CEO at NAVER WEBTOON, and his work because he achieved success by doing what he loves: comics. I think he is someone you can look up to if you work at a company because most of us can’t always do what we love. In fact, there are more cases where we have to do things that we don’t like at all. It was the same with Vintage City. I did have an interest in vintage goods, but I wasn’t a huge fan of it. Nevertheless, I do believe that you can love your job after all even if you first started off with a sense of duty. It was very interesting for me to see the number of users grow from 100 at the first month of service launch, and then into a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and to two hundred thousand. I hope our project could serve as an example of showing how work that wasn’t fun at all can turn into something that you love and eventually into a successful project if you stay committed.
Do you have a particular habit or routine that comes with the job?
I don’t know whether I can call this a habit, but I am a person of perseverance. I decided to become a designer 6 months before I took the college entrance exam. I worked hard because I started late. For example, when other people spent an hour on their drawing at the art academy, I arrived earlier than my peers so that I could practice more on my drawing. My first project as a designer was to design with elegance. I used a mix of black and gold and my boss said to me as soon as he saw my design, “Myong-won, go and take a look around the Galleria Luxury Hall.” So I did during the weekend. I went there to see what kind of design and colors are considered elegant. I saw something that was colored in navy with a hint of mint, and I found it very elegant. So I used these colors in my design, and people really loved it. Ever since then, whenever I come across impressive color schemes, I’ve saved them for my own design. Saving a color a week resulted in a wide range of color palettes for me to use as a designer after many weeks. This habit helped me to become a designer who is good with colors from someone who had really bad taste in choosing colors. This shows that even though one does not have what it takes to be a designer, with sheer perseverance, anyone can become a great designer.
