How an accelerator turned us into an accelerator

German Accelerator South Korea Market Discovery — Mid-Program Review

Lately, K-Beauty has been playing an increasingly important role at SQIN. Thus, we have also created a special category for it in our magazine. Our goal is to act as an accelerator for Korean brands in Europe! But how did this come about?

“Eight German startups will soon explore South Korea through our Market Discovery program! 🚀 🇰🇷 Our team of local experts will help them navigate this thriving ecosystem through in-depth culture sessions, industry insights, and much more.” That’s what the German Accelerator Asia posted on LinkedIn in July. One month and numerous insightful workshops and discussions later, we would like to take a first look back.

Even though this accelerator is not the first one for us, it is always exciting to start into such a program. We are deeply convinced that you can only develop yourself and your company if you embrace new perspectives.

The Korean market is a very special one for us: Korean beauty routines are not just a trend, but go back to centuries-old traditions. For healthy and flawless skin, Korean skin care experts swear by extensive care routines, because in Korea, people firmly believe in a holistic approach. Self-care is the key, also to beautiful skin.

However, we soon learned that this focus on the topic does not necessarily make a market entry easier. The first mentoring sessions were rather sobering for us, as we learned that skin care plays an extremely important role in the lives of Koreans and that dermatologists and specialists are available almost on every corner. So do they even need an app like ours?

We gathered ourselves together and started to think about how we could bring our value and certain features together in such a way that we could fulfill a need in the Korean market.

With our approach, which sees skin health as the result of cosmetics, lifestyle and nutrition combined, we think we can also appeal to Korean users. That’s why we now want to test exactly that with a small focus group.

Another result of our mentoring sessions: we want to enable Korean brands, but also opinion leaders, to reach the German-speaking market. With our app, we want to create a platform for this.

We are ready and full of energy to start the second half of the program and are excited to see what it has in store for us!