If pop culture in the last quarter of 2021 was defined by one show, it would probably be “Squid Game.” The South Korean survival drama smashed every Netflix record with more than 142 million accounts tuning in. But Korean pop culture had been on a meteoric rise in the U.S. mainstream since long before everyone donned a red jumpsuit as a Halloween costume. The enduring popularity of K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink, the proliferation of K-beauty brands, and “Parasite” earning the 2020 Oscar for best picture were all milestones along the way.
Entrepreneur Carol Pak is on a mission to accelerate the growth of another Korean cultural category in the U.S.—Korean alcohol.
“For the first few years [after launch in 2017] we were unsure, how much should we lean into our Korean identity, history, and heritage?” she said. In 2021 she decided to go for it, and put her Korean heritage at the forefront of the brand she founded by renaming her company “Sool,” the Korean word for alcohol.
Pak’s first product (and my quarantine obsession), Màkku, is a makkuli, Korea’s oldest alcoholic beverage. This tangy, lightly sparkling fermented rice drink is at once creamy and refreshing—think of a scoop of Greek frozen yogurt on a hot day and you’re in the right territory.
Just don’t call it “Korean rice wine.” In the same way that sake earned a category name of its own and left behind “Japanese rice wine,” Pak is carving out a discrete market for makkuli stateside. Defining a new category in a competitive market is a considerable challenge, and Pak spent energy searching out the right people for the team to help her tackle it this year.
“In 2020, I only had a part-time marketer for 10 hours a week,” she says. “This year I hired a few more and we were able to do more creatively, like working with videographers and photographers.” She said 2022 will be about growing and scaling Sool, so establishing a rock-solid team was a key goal in 2021.
This year Sool brought a first-of-its-kind product to the U.S. market, a canned sparkling soju cocktail called Soku. Soku was originally released in October as a soju seltzer in three flavors—tangerine, pineapple, and strawberry. It “sold out of the entire first run,” says Pak, “and took some time restocking because of domestic freight issues.” During that restocking time the team pivoted and dropped the seltzer title to focus on the cocktail aspect of the drink and take advantage of “this explosive category.” Pak feels that the seltzer shelves have quickly become saturated while the top players in ready-to-drink cocktails are still emerging.
Those freight issues took about a 20% bite out of Pak’s margins in 2021, but even with stocking and distribution challenges, Sool posted a two-and-a-half-times increase in revenue year-over-year. And while those might not be quite “Squid Game” numbers, they’re promising signs of growth in a budding category.
“Many accounts were really reluctant to carry us. A lot of them only started carrying us because the customer started asking them,” Pak says. She took this as an indicator of the powerful and loyal community she was building around Sool. “I don’t really know how a brand is built, but I feel like somehow we built a brand.”
Words,Mandy Naglich