Game and cosmetics might be as far away to each other as possible. But GP Club proves that they can put it side by side. And gain a fortune from both.
GP Club founder, Kim Jung-woong started his story just like any other successful billionaire: family’s financial crisis. After the loss of his father, Kim felt the urge of earning money on his own.
GP Club: From a game store to a cosmetic brand
As an avid gamer, Kim worked on a game store. Helping the elderly couple running the store, Kim saved around $4,000. Then he borrowed $3,000 more from his family. This is the start of today’s GP Club.
GP is an acronym of Game Paradise, the name of the small store Kim opened. The store sold video game and game consoles. Starting from one small store, it grew up to five more stores in the years later.
Kim’s trip to China was about to change everything. Starting off as a simple trip to purchase canvas bags to resell, Chinese interest over K-pop stole Kim’s attention.
Right then, he realized that China was going to be a huge market for Korean product. So Kim decided to avert his business. GP Club became a middleman of Korean beauty brands entering the Chinese market.
Soon, the Korean brands started to ship their products straight to China but Kim couldn’t just watch his business crumbling. Starting off in a small factory, GP Club launched its first cosmetic brand, JM Solutions.
Journey to Miracle, as it says. And it is indeed a journey to miracle. Just a while after its launch Korea government agreed to deploy the US anti-missile THAAD system. It banned groups of Chinese tourists from entering Korea and then put the beauty industry in Korea on a slug that even giant company Amorepacific was suffering.
The fortune bombing sheet masks
But Kim is persistent. Instead of putting down his business, he invested his money to develop a new product. At the time he only got KRW1.5 billion, roughly $1.5 million. And he invested it all to the research and development of sheet masks.
Unlike traditional masks, sheet masks are thin sheets of paper based tissue infused with beauty essence and serums. The products blew up that the company sold more than 800 million sheet masks by 2018, just one year after its first launch.
Now, almost every beauty brand in Korea and Asia has its own version of the beauty sheet masks. But GP Club still sells the most with its original Honey Luminous Royal Propolis Mask, Active Jellyfish Vital Mask and the most popular, Active Pink Snail Brightening Mask.
Now the company is at around KRW 10 trillion or around $10 billion valuation. And Kim Jung-woong is included in Forbes’ 2019 Korea’s 50 Richest with net worth of $1.2 billion as of July 2019.
