Seoul entrepreneur gives Kodak brand renewed life
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In a recent New York Times feature story, “The Kodak Brand Gets a Second Life,” writer David Andreatta tells the story of the Kodak Corner Shop, located “on the bustling main drag of Seongsu-dong, a former warehouse district turned hipster haven in Seoul.” Kodak Apparel and its related shops are the brainchild of Lee Jun Kwon, the chief executive of Hilight Brands, a South Korean fashion company that has been acquiring licenses to prominent trademarks. The company holds licenses for Diadora and Malbon Golf, and has Kodak Apparel outlets in Japan, Taiwan and China. There are no Kodak Apparel stores in the United States.
“We believed Kodak could not be limited to just the keywords ‘camera’ and ‘film,’” a company representative, Hyejin Park, wrote in an email. Kodak Apparel dovetails with a resurgence in film photography and a youth culture trend in South Korea known as “newtro” — a portmanteau that describes a blend of contemporary style (“new”) with nostalgia and vintage design (“retro”). American brands that have been “newtroed” in South Korea include National Geographic, Discovery, CNN and the aeronautics defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
According to the article, brand licensing is a growing part of Kodak’s business, accounting for $20 million in revenue last year. That represents a 35 percent increase over five years ago, when branding became a stand-alone segment of the company. Kodak currently has 44 brand licensees, according to the company, and some of them make products that many people might consider unrelated to the thing they most associate with the company: photography.
But company officials said elements of photography like creativity, telling stories and preserving memories were often integrated in the products bearing the Kodak logo.
“Our brand licensing portfolio begins with photography and imaging, but it’s much broader than that,” said Clara Fort, the vice president for global brand licensing at the company.
Ms. Fort pointed to Kodak’s wide-ranging apparel licensing deals in Asia, Europe and the United States as natural extensions of the brand at a time when images, amplified by social media, are central to daily life.