Tell us about yourself and your role at Amorepacific.

My name is Keilly Kim, and I am Head of the E-Commerce Division at Amorepacific. I am experienced in the consumer goods sector, mainly involving various online and offline channels, and I joined Amorepacific in January this year. Together with our teams at the E-Commerce Division, I am responsible for all processes related to selling Amorepacific's products via 30+ online and TV commerce platforms in South Korea. I have 28 years of work experience, and I am a working mom with a daughter in college and a son in high school. I like watching movies in my free time, and I am partial to thriller movies because they relieve my stress. I've recently fallen in love with golf, and I practice golf whenever I have the time, with the goal of hitting 90 within the year. What is currently most important for me in life is "health" and "good influence." With the belief that healthy thoughts come from a healthy body, I exercise regularly. Also, I try to act right and say positive things as much as possible, hoping that the people around me can get good energy through me. Someday in the future, I would like to run a company as a CEO by using all my experience and skills.

You became a new member of the Amorepacific family this year. What do you have to say about your new life at Amorepacific so far?

I'm delighted with my job at Amorepacific because the company has a solid profit structure and a wide variety of brands and products, which allows many opportunities to experiment with new ideas in the e-commerce business. What was interesting about Amorepacific to me was that as the company entered into the e-commerce business in earnest, carrying out new mid-to-long-term goals in addition to short-term plans that arose.
I fell in love with the company's warm corporate culture, where employees can fulfill their passions. I was also moved by our management philosophy, "We make A MORE Beautiful world." In the future, I will strive to become a leader at Amorepacific who works passionately, helps junior colleagues grow into excellent workers, and delivers the best results.

What is your view on the current state and future of e-commerce?

Due to the increase in online shopping resulting from the spread of the non-face-to-face-trend in the COVID-19 era, I expect the e-commerce market to continue its growth streak. In South Korea, the demand for "gift-giving" via mobile has been seeing massive growth. Cases of manufacturing companies directly building and running their own malls (D2C) are increasing along with the trend of non-face-to-face shopping. Moreover, live commerce, a "visible non-face-to-face avenue," is also emerging as a popular way of selling products by combining the four elements of "live," "interactive," "shopping," and "fun."
On a related note, e-commerce platforms are also increasingly going beyond simply selling products and incorporating other functions, such as marketing. Platforms themselves become a means of promotion and marketing, and any company with customer data, product information, and payment functions can turn into an e-commerce platform. Future e-commerce will require self-sustaining selling power and AI-based competitive content. We want to match platform strategies with products and beauty services customized for the non-face-to-face shopping experience.

What are the achievements, goals and vision of Amorepacific's E-Commerce Division for this year?

The E-Commerce Division's efforts since our declaration for digital transformation are coming to fruition. Our division shows high performance on the South Korean "big 5" platforms (Naver, Kakao, Coupang, Gmarket, and 11th Street), and our live commerce efforts are also continuing to achieve new sales records. This shows that we are accumulating successes.
Those achievements are the results of nurturing our e-commerce experts to become platform experts within Amorepacific. We are continuously supporting our e-commerce teams with the latest training and various commerce platform experiences and developing convenient sales tools for them so that they can become experts in their platforms. As we advance, I will continue to try to make various changes to turn our existing B2B-friendly concepts and systems into ones more compatible with B2C. I hope to turn Amorepacific's E-Commerce Division into a place that teems with e-commerce experts and delivers the most outstanding digital performance among South Korean brand companies.

What is your advice to those who aspire to become e-commerce experts?

To become an e-commerce expert, your expertise in platforms and products in the beauty market as a whole is paramount. Your first step should be to thoroughly familiarize yourself with the e-commerce platform you are responsible for running. In addition to simply approaching your e-commerce platform as a single shopping channel, you must also have in-depth knowledge of its context by understanding the platform's history, growth process, sales portfolio, target customers, advertising banner efficiency, search word rankings, top brands, and strategies for the year. The next thing you should do is analyze our products and trends across the whole beauty market and understand which products yield results on all on and offline channels. Some people make the mistake of coming up with uniform plans thinking of the e-commerce market as a single online market. However, because the market is more complex and sensitive to trends than offline markets, you must make a habit of analyzing and checking yesterday's trends and today's activities every morning.
E-commerce experts are both marketing and sales specialists at the same time. The ability to efficiently yield output relative to input must be a core competency – more so than any other functions. Additionally, because any idea can be realized in the e-commerce business market, a company's sales division offers many opportunities. I've always believed that passion is vital in making the best of those opportunities.