Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2014. Its figures are from 2014, including Haan Corp’s revenue of 120 million dollars in 2013 and a 75% market share, as well as an earlier 80% share against Samsung and LG.
Romi Haan, considered one of South Korea’s most powerful businesswomen, believed so firmly in her business idea that she was willing to lose everything to make her company a success. It wasn’t just her own house at stake, which was used to finance the company. If her business failed, her parents’ house and the family’s money were also at risk.
In short, as she herself put it in an interview with Business Insider, “if the company didn’t work out, everyone would end up on the street”.
She is the founder and CEO of Haan Corp, a multimillion-dollar company in South Korea that was carried to success by its creator’s extreme confidence, unshakeable courage, vision and extreme risk-taking. Perhaps that determination is what helped her break into an industry dominated by men.
In 1998, Haan came up with the idea for a cleaning device that she thought could revolutionise the industry, so she did not hesitate to leave her job as an official at the Ministry of Education.
In Korea, people walk barefoot around the house and eat and sleep on the floor, so for Korean women cleaning the floor is a very hard, thankless chore.
So Haan, who hated cleaning the floors in her home, looked for an alternative: a kind of steam mop. First, Haan founded Hanyoung Electric in 1999, but everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Developing the product, which was supposed to take six months, dragged on for two years, and Haan ran into funding problems. Every investor turned her down: with their sexist culture, they wouldn’t bet on a woman entrepreneur.
See also: If you have a good business idea
She even says some bankers told her to go home and leave this kind of venture to her husband. That was when she had to put all of her family’s assets, and her parents’, on the line, convinced she would succeed while knowing that failure was a real possibility.
Her plan B, if she failed, was to work for the rest of her life to repay all the money her relatives had lent her. She says she was clear that if she failed, she was perfectly capable of starting again from scratch and getting back on her feet.
But it was the fear of losing everything that became her greatest motivation not to give up and to keep moving forward and fighting.
Her first steam mop model was a failure because it was too complicated. With her second model she ran into sexism again: the buyers at Korean companies were men, and so they did not appreciate a product that made life easier for women (who were the ones doing the cleaning).
Haan changed her strategy.
Faced with the sexist culture and the problems it was causing her, she decided to change her strategy and market the product directly to women. Word of mouth among women spread across Korea, and in 2004 Haan found she had sold 2,000 mops through a few TV commercials.
When the company began to take off like a rocket, Samsung and LG started producing various imitations, realising that this product could be a very profitable business, but neither Samsung nor LG managed to take Haan’s 80% market share away from her.
In 2006, Haan renamed her company Haan Corp to set it apart from its competitors, and in 2007 she made a strong entry into the United States market thanks to agreements with large strategic distributors.
Last year, Haan Corp had revenue of 120 million dollars, and it holds on to a 75% market share.
Now Romi Haan is working to inspire other women in South Korea and to put an end to sexism in business, and she has created a programme to support women entrepreneurs.
Haan’s advice for entrepreneurs
She says that if she had to start over, she would first work at a household appliance company to get to know the industry, and she would get up to speed on marketing techniques to avoid the many mistakes she made at the beginning. In fact, she says her strategy was to fail, fail again and learn from her failures along the way, even though she couldn’t afford to fail very often.
Haan says that “the only thing that kept her going through the difficulties was never thinking about giving up”. She says her mindset was to either succeed or fail, but giving up was not an option for her after everything she had risked.
Without a doubt, this is a motivating story about a woman from whom we can draw plenty of business lessons, and of course a lesson for all the women living in countries where a deeply sexist culture still exists.
Featured image: Fix 1998, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
