The first Korean things I paid attention to were horror films during my college days. They were good movies, and I filed them under good filmmakers the way you file a chef under good cooks without wondering much about the country.
Then the usual household electronics. LG air conditioner on the wall of most Indian middle-class homes I knew growing up. We had a Samsung fridge in the kitchen. Both bought for reliability and price if I recall my childhood memories with dad right. Of course I wasn't thinking about Korea back then. I was thinking about cool water after school.
Decades later, 2022 was when that changed.
I was building Native's first products and doing the research any hardware person does when trying to understand what would make appliances feel 'Native' or polished and unique. I started saving industrial design references that seemed worth studying including good CMF decisions, form that was doing something beyond function, and some bits around product languages that felt consistent across a line. It'd be until a year later when I'd start thinking about design language consistency but I kept saving for when the day would come. And somewhere around the fourth or fifth time a reference led back to a Seoul agency, I started paying attention to the pattern.
That's when I began watching CES (Consumer Electronics Show) differently. I started noticing that the consumer appliance moves with actual products (not concepts) shipping at scale were incepting at Samsung, LG, and Coway before they appeared anywhere else. The Samsung Bespoke series, which had been launched in Korea years earlier would become mainstream in India in 2025. A refrigerator sitting in Korean showrooms for half a decade before it was considered suitable for us.
I couldn't explain this gap. Why six years? Who decided we weren't ready? And more to the point: what was happening in Korea that kept generating this kind of thing, category after category, at a pace and quality level that nobody else was matching in consumer hardware?
It was very difficult to find anything useful to read. I went through years of CES coverage. I went through industrial design breakdowns that treated the products as objects with polished AF renders rather than outputs of a system. Nothing that answered the question I actually had: what decisions did they make, and when, and who made them, and what did it cost to hold that line?
Last month I went to Suwon and Seoul (Koreans pronounce it Sole, not See-oul) for ten days for a project. I spent most of my late nights reading three books religiously: Euny Hong's The Birth of Korean Cool, Geoffrey Cain's Samsung Rising, and Hello! South Korea which had been on my list for years and which I'd finally run out of reasons to delay. Somewhere in those ten days, between the book and the city and the things I kept stopping to look at, and the conversations I had with people there, a question I'd been carrying vaguely since 2022 became specific enough to actually answer.
A brief history lesson
In 1965, South Korea's per capita GDP was lower than Ghana's. As recently as the 1970s, North and South Korea's GDPs were roughly equal. This is the backdrop against which Samsung was assembling electric fans whose necks broke when you lifted them with one hand. Supremely poor quality products.
Today, Seoul has an invisible skyscraper under construction (it's not in existence but was planned). It would use cameras and LEDs to create the illusion, from a distance, that the building isn't there. Every subway car has two wi-fi hotspots. The connection doesn't drop even going through tunnels, even below water. Korea was the first country in the world to install internet access in a hundred percent of its schools. It wired the entire country for broadband in the late nineties, treating it like basic infrastructure.
The speed is one of the things that's easy to misread. Korea looks futuristic, so you assume it's been building toward this for a long time. It hasn't. The miracle is sixty years old. Korea learned from rebuilding after the Korean War that if change has to happen, it has to be fast, and it has to be for everyone. They established that E-mail is useless if only some people have it. The same logic extends, apparently, to refrigerators.
The Samsung I grew up with — the Samsung of the LG AC on the wall and the Samsung fridge in the kitchen — was already the finished product of one of the most deliberate industrial transformations in modern history. Samsung was called Samsuck before this transformation.
That name is the actual starting point.
What happened between Samsuck and Sony
In 1993, Samsung ranked fourth in the domestic mobile phone market. They barely had any presence outside Korea. Samsung was pretty bad at electronics back then. Even an electric fan which isn't a complex product was so poorly made that merely lifting it with one hand broke its neck.
For the transformation, Samsung set a target - Sony. Back then, Sony's design and product quality represented the ceiling of what a consumer electronics company could be. I took note of this detail. Growing up, we had a Sony TV and till date, I use a Sony TV (along with their soundbar and the PS5). Back then, Sony wasn't the most powerful tech company. To Koreans, and even my dad who took all electronics purchase decisions, Sony's the one whose things were best. Samsung looked at Sony and wrote it on the wall.
In early 1993, Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee gathered hundreds of Samsung executives at a hotel in Frankfurt for a three-day speech. He told them: change everything but your wife and kids. This became the Frankfurt Declaration of 1993. Unlike the fate of typical corporate declarations, this one held, because it was followed almost immediately by the kind of action that makes declarations credible.
In 1995, Lee flew to the factory in Gumi, in south-central Korea, where a new line of cell phones was being produced. Some of the phones were defective. He had signs printed: Quality is my personality and my self-worth. He had the two thousand factory workers put on paper headbands that read Quality Assurance. Then he had them pile the factory's entire inventory (roughly a hundred thousand mobile phones) on the factory floor and ordered them smashed with hammers. Then he set the pile on fire.
The fire cost fifty million dollars.
Two things happening at once in that fire: a demonstration of how seriously the chairman meant what he'd said in Frankfurt two years earlier, and a bet. The bet was that the next version of Samsung would be different enough that burning the current one was worth it. Both of those things had to be true for the gesture to make sense.
I learned an interesting thing. What made the Samsung transformation possible was a strategic insight about where the competition actually was. Samsung couldn't compete on analog technology. Sony had twenty years of analog engineering experience. Trying to close that gap would have taken decades and probably failed. But digital was a blank slate. In the digital world, as the Samsung researchers understood, an industry-standard chip is the same quality regardless of who makes it. Everyone starts equal. Samsung bet entirely on digital while its competitors were still defending analog positions, and they turned out to be right about when the shift would happen.
The other important bet was design and this is the part that Geoffrey Cain's Samsung Rising documents in granular detail that I couldn't get anywhere else.
In 1994, Samsung opened a design office in Palo Alto. In 1995, it launched the Innovative Design Lab with Gordon Bruce, a professor from ArtCenter in Pasadena. Lee published a design scrapbook circulated across the company. It benchmarked products that Samsung needed to study and internalise: the Sony Walkman, the Braun coffeemaker, the Apple PowerBook, the Coke bottle. The directive was minimalism and sleekness. The designers drew a perceptual map: one axis from simplicity to complexity, the other from feeling to reason. Apple went in the simplicity/feeling quadrant. Sony went in complexity/reason. Samsung found itself in Sony's quadrant. They decided that was the wrong place to be because it was too narrow a competition. They targeted the middle ground, overshooting slightly toward Apple.
In 1996, Lee gave his New Year's address: "The upcoming twenty-first century marks the Age of Culture. No longer is a company selling products. Instead they have to sell their philosophy and culture." He declared 1996 the Year of the Design Revolution.
Design centres opened in London in 2000, Shanghai in 2004, Milan in 2005, New Delhi in 2008.
In the 1990s, a term circulated in business circles: the "Korea discount." It meant Korean goods had to be sold cheaper than equivalent products just to compete because the reputation for shoddiness was priced in. Goldstar couldn't fix its reputation, so it dropped the name and became LG. Samsung did market research and came back with what they decided was good news: nobody had heard of Samsung. The name stayed.
The name "Sony" had been on the wall since 1993. Samsung overtook it in brand value sometime in the mid-2000s. Twelve years from Frankfurt to fact. Someone had to decide to hold the line for twelve years and mean it from the first day.
Coming to India now
boAt has built a large domestic presence in audio. Market share numbers in India that would have been unimaginable for an Indian consumer brand a decade ago. The design has gotten noticeably better in the last five years so I'm sure someone there is paying attention. But the target, as far as I can tell from the products themselves, is still a discounted version of an international brand. Not a product that makes the international brand feel overpriced. That's a different ambition.
Noise makes wearables positioned against Garmin and Apple Watch. They're in the right segment. The gap is that "positioned against" and "actually competitive with" are not the same thing. A Noise GPS watch at about ₹8,000 competes with a Garmin Forerunner on price. It doesn't compete on the thing a Garmin user actually cares about: accuracy, reliability, trust over years of use. The form factor is right. The substance underneath it isn't there yet.
The parallel holds almost exactly, with one difference I haven't been able to fully resolve: Samsung's transformation happened inside a single company, driven by a single chairman with the authority and capital to make radical moves without being questioned. The Indian equivalent doesn't exist. Havells is not Samsung. boAt doesn't have a Lee Kun-hee. And the Indian government's relationship to its hardware sector looks nothing like the Korean government's relationship to Samsung in 1962, when President Park Chung-hee designated Samsung a national instrument and arranged the foreign loans to let it scale.
Whether the Korean model specifically requires the Korean government-corporation structure, or whether it can be achieved differently? This is the question I've been sitting with since I got back.
What actually made it work
What made the Samsung transformation possible isn't just a corporate memo by the leadership, though the books about Samsung tend to make it seem like it is. There's an older story underneath.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis hit South Korea hard. Over half the chaebols (large, family-owned businesses in Korea) shut down. Unemployment spiked. Interest rates spiked. The government negotiated a fifty-seven-billion-dollar IMF loan; the day they made the request was called the Day of National Humility. Wealthy Korean women gave up their wedding rings to be melted down into gold ingots for the national recovery fund. Athletes gave up their Olympic medals and trophies. Eight metric tons of privately donated gold in the first week.
Eight metric tons. In one week. Voluntarily.
This is the part that I keep returning to. The collective response to national humiliation was to contribute personal gold to the recovery. It would be easy to read that as civic obedience. Koreans genuinely didn't consider this unusual. They knew they were a poor country not long ago. Defeating poverty had always been understood as a collective project, not an individual one.
The crisis became paradoxically the moment Korea built its future. Samsung stopped making cars and focused entirely on electronics. Hyundai stopped making electronics and focused entirely on cars. Both companies made the kind of decisive pivots that are nearly impossible from a position of comfort. The national crisis stripped out the option of defending existing positions, so they focused on where they were actually strong.
President Kim Dae-jung, who came into office in February 1998 with the specific task of cleaning up the debt disaster, called a PR firm. A radical move indeed. He wanted to rebrand the country. His reasoning, as reported by the executive he called: Koreans are good at engaging in crisis. They've been invaded hundreds of times. Only two countries are still alive after hundreds of invasions: Scotland and Korea. He asked the PR firm to not hide the crisis but to spin it in Korea's favour. The book Kim and the PR firm published within a month of that first call was called Korea: On Course and Open for Business. The message to international investors: crisis brings out the best in us. Come in.
Then came another radical move. Under Kim, the government made a bet that still seems improbable when you say it plainly: they decided to invest heavily in popular culture as an economic pillar. A country in a debt crisis, with the IMF on the phone, decides that K-pop, K-drama, and Korean film are strategic infrastructure. In 2012, a third of all venture capital in Korea was being spent on the entertainment industry which was more than any other sector. The government audited karaoke rooms to ensure royalty payments were being made. The cultural content ministry had five-year plans with specific export revenue targets. The government was wiring every household to a one-gigabit connection while the average American internet connection was running at roughly five megabits.
Most countries would never stand for using public funds to audit karaoke rooms. This idea was so ridiculous that only South Korea would think of it.
Beneath all of this is han. Pay attention now. This is important.
Han is an accumulated grievance. Han means suffering that was not your fault, inflicted by fate, that cannot be fully avenged, so it compounds. Every generation inherits the han of the one before it.
Han is not the same as anger. It's anger with no clean outlet, which means it becomes fuel rather than heat. It accumulates and goes somewhere. The target Samsung chose was not random. Sony was Japan's most respected consumer electronics company, the country that had occupied Korea for thirty-five years, forced hundreds of thousands of Koreans into labor.
I kept thinking, reading this: what is India's han?
Not rhetorically. As an actual question. The answer isn't obvious to me. India's relationship to its colonial history is more diffuse, harder to focus into a single target. The grievance is real but it doesn't have the same shape as Korea's relationship to Japan. India's han, if it exists as a comparable force, is more dispersed. Maybe that's why it's harder to channel.
The thing that hasn't happened yet in India
Korea's transformation required two things working together: a government willing to make long bets and absorb long timelines, and companies with the discipline to hold the line while waiting for results.
K-pop is a five-to-seven-year plan per artist. The US can't run that model because the economics don't support it. Korea can, because the system was designed to absorb that horizon. The Samsung design transformation worked on a similar timeline: the Palo Alto office opened in 1994, the Year of the Design Revolution was declared in 1996, the brand overtook Sony sometime around 2005. From first investment to result: roughly ten years. Someone had to fund the Palo Alto office in 1994 and not expect a return until 2005.
Most Indian hardware companies are not operating on a ten-year design investment timeline. I'm not sure many are operating on a three-year one. The capital environment for hardware in India is genuinely difficult. Hardware is slow, capital-intensive, low-margin until it isn't, and requires patience from investors who have trained themselves on software timelines. The quarterly pressure on any company that needs to show revenue makes the Frankfurt-style declaration from Samsung nearly impossible. You can't announce a Year of the Design Revolution when you're also trying to make payroll and explain the burn to your board.
The Indian path may have to be structurally different. Not a single chairman ordering a fire, but enough companies building toward a standard that the standard itself starts to become the floor. There should be enough product companies taking design seriously enough that the supply chain, the tooling vendors, the CMF vendors, the ID teams build that capability because the demand is consistently there for high quality. Coway became a global benchmark in air purifiers because someone inside the company decided what the product had to be and held that line across product cycles, and the rest of the organisation eventually organised around it.
What I think is actually needed is someone willing to name the target specifically. Samsung named Sony. Wrote it on the wall. Made it specific enough that you could tell when you'd missed it. The Indian hardware sector hasn't named its Sony. "World-class" isn't a target; it's a placeholder for not having decided yet. Which company, in which category, by which year, are we measuring ourselves against? Until that question has an answer that someone is willing to say out loud and be accountable to, the five-year plan has nothing to point at.
Here's what I think it would actually take
I finished The birth of Korean cool last and as I went through my collective notes from all three books, here are some that I feel strongly about:
1. Real, heavy diagnosis
Samsung spent months walking through factories, meeting designers, writing a report on Samsung's best and worst practices before proposing anything. The chairman's brief was specific: make designers creative, make them globally aware, expect a 3% return (whatever that meant). This activity took months which is nothing given they were gunning to build a generational company.
Indian hardware companies skip this step entirely. They hire a design agency, get a deliverable, and call it a design transformation. They comfortably skip the obvious questions. Why are the products the way they are? Is it the brief, the capability, the supply chain, the reviewer's taste, or the assumption about what the customer will accept? Until you know which of those is the problem, any intervention is guesswork.
2. Build an internal design school
Samsung built an internal design school, run by ArtCenter professors, where 700 of Samsung's designers were filtered down to twelve who got accepted. The curriculum included nine weeks a year travelling. Places would include Apple's first computers at the Smithsonian, the temples of Kyoto, the palaces of Versailles, the Taj Mahal. Ted Shin, one of the twelve, said he learned something at the Taj Mahal he couldn't describe and couldn't have learned from a photograph. The smell, the drape of light on the dome at different times of day. He went back to Samsung and designed a five-lensed camcorder.
The point is not that you need to take your designers to the Taj Mahal. The point is that Samsung understood their problem was not that they needed better agencies. It was that their own designers couldn't yet tell good from bad and couldn't generate the brief in the first place, let alone execute it. You cannot outsource the development of aesthetic judgment. You can outsource a brief. Judgment has to be built internally, over years, in people who stay.
3. Design from cultural identity
Initially, Samsung's product line had no house style. Their phones looked like Motorola's. Their remotes looked like Sony's. This happened because Samsung was hiring foreign studios to import foreign house styles, product by product, and the result was a company that looked like it couldn't decide what it was. A common problem we see in a lot of hardware products in India.
The Indian version of this question is still open. What is the design language rooted in something specifically Indian. Let's not get carried away. I don't mean "inspired by Indian motifs" in a literal sense, but structurally, philosophically, in how a product balances its opposites? I don't have a clean answer. But the question has to be asked before the product brief is written.
4. Crystal clear positioning
Samsung drew two axes: simplicity to complexity on one, feeling to reason on the other. Then they placed every major competitor on the grid. Apple: simplicity/feeling. Sony: complexity/reason. Samsung found itself sitting in Sony's quadrant, which was the wrong place to be because it meant competing directly with Sony on Sony's terms, in Sony's domain, without any differentiation.
They targeted the middle ground between Sony and Apple, overshooting slightly toward Apple's softness. It forces you to say what you are relative to what already exists, rather than describing yourself in absolute terms. "Premium Indian brand" is not a position. "Sits between Havells and Bosch on the complexity axis, owns the feeling axis more than either" is a position. You can test against it, product by product, and know when you've drifted.
5. Name the target publicly and be okay to get in trouble for it
In 2001, Eric Kim gave an interview to Forbes and said: "We want to beat Sony. Sony has the strongest brand awareness. We want to be stronger than Sony by 2005." He almost got fired. Samsung was supplying chips for the PlayStation and the Walkman CD player. Saying it out loud created genuine business risk.
But, it also rallied the entire organisation. The target had been written on the wall internally since Frankfurt in 1993. Making it public was a different act: it created accountability, set a deadline, and made the ambition legible to every person inside the company who was deciding how hard to push on any given day.
There is no Indian hardware company that has done this. Named a specific global competitor. Set a specific year or said it in an interview.
6. Set budgets to potential sales, not current sales
When Eric Kim consolidated Samsung's marketing, his first structural move was to change how the marketing budget was calculated. The previous method: a percentage of current revenues which rewarded defending what already existed. His new method proposal was a percentage of potential revenues which forced the organisation to think about where it was going, not where it was. Now, this might seem like something everyone does. But there's a difference.
A company that budgets on potential revenues has to decide, explicitly, what it believes the potential is. Which means deciding what it's building toward. It'll force marketing to bring out their A game to match the potential they've envisioned.
7. The person at the top needs genuine aesthetic judgement
Samsung's transformative Chairman, Lee Kun-hee's home had no gold-plated bathrooms. It was understated, carefully arranged with every wooden fixture and screen door placed with thought. He already understood design principles intuitively. The company's design ambition was an extension of the chairman's personal taste, not a separate department that reported to him.
He had employees park their cars behind factories when he visited because their cars were ugly and offended him. He had a design scrapbook. It was a personal document of objects he believed were good: the Sony Walkman, the Braun coffeemaker, the Coke bottle, the Apple PowerBook. These were things he had looked at himself and decided were worth aspiring to.
You cannot run a design-led hardware company if the person making the final call on a product can't tell good from bad themselves. You can hire people who can. But at some point the judgment has to come from the top, and it has to be real that's earned through years of looking at things carefully. This judgement cannot be acquired as a management function. This is the part of the Samsung story that is hardest to replicate by policy.
8. Like the movie Rockstar, something has to die.
Samsung stopped making cars. Hyundai stopped making electronics. Both companies made the kind of decisive pivots that are nearly impossible from a position of comfort, because comfort always produces a reason to defend the existing thing.
The Samsung that became the world's most valuable consumer electronics company was not Samsung-but-also-cars. It was Samsung-and-nothing-else. The Korean economic crisis created the conditions for that focus by eliminating the option to protect everything simultaneously.
Most Indian hardware founders diversify before they've earned the right to. The Samsung lesson is that genuine excellence in one category requires giving something up. What is the Indian hardware company willing to stop doing in order to become the best at one thing?
9. Invest in infrastructure
I read in the book that in 1994, while the US was still arguing about whether the government had the right to force citizens to buy digital televisions, Korea was wiring the entire country for broadband by treating internet infrastructure the way you'd treat a national highway. The logic was straightforward: e-mail is useless if only some people have it. The product only works if the platform exists. Korea built the platform before the content existed to fill it, and then the content came.
The equivalent question for Indian hardware is not about government policy. We can't control it. It's internal: what platform investments are you making now that will make your products better in five years, regardless of whether they show up in this year's margins? Supply chain capability. Tooling depth. In-house testing infrastructure. The ability to iterate on a mould rather than commit to a mould. These compound slowly and invisibly until suddenly they're the reason you can do something your competitor can't - move at the speed of light.
10. Failure & humiliation are the actual catalysts
The Hallyu wave came from the Day of National Humility — the day Korea took the IMF loan in December 1997. Every Korean refers to it as the IMF crisis, not the Asian financial crisis, because the humiliation of needing the loan was the galvanising fact. The entertainment industry had never tried to export before, because they assumed nobody wanted Korean content. The crisis forced them to try, with no backup plan. They had their backs to the wall and they found out, by accident, that the world would watch Korean drama.
The Samsung design transformation had its own version of this moment. Remember the broken fan neck I mentioned earlier?
The most dangerous position for an Indian hardware company is comfortable enough to not be specifically embarrassed. Vague aspiration is not fuel. Specific embarrassment is. The brands that break out are the ones that have named the particular thing that is currently unacceptable. Move from "we should be more design-led" to "this joint, right here, at this price point, in this category, is not good enough and we know it."
11. Build the ecosystem, not just the product
The K-pop model works because it is not music. It is music plus video plus merchandise plus live performance plus fan infrastructure plus government IP protection plus VC funding plus five-to-seven-year talent pipelines, all coordinated. CJ E&M ran music labels, TV channels, a streaming platform, and a concert hall as a single integrated business. The product and the platform were being built simultaneously, by design. In simple words, it's a lot of things coming together.
Korean cool worked the same way at the national level: Samsung and LG built the aspiration through consumer electronics, K-drama extended it through narrative, K-pop deepened it through identity, and the government created the conditions for all three to operate at scale. No single piece of this was sufficient. Each piece reinforced every other piece.
Indian hardware's structural weakness is that products get built in isolation from the ecosystem that would amplify them. A great Indian water purifier without a brand story, without content that educates the category, without a community that takes water quality seriously ends up becoming a purifier competing on only price. The product and the platform have to grow together, even when the platform is invisible to the customer.
12. Opportunity with the next generation
Indian hardware is currently behind in precision mechanical engineering, in thermal management, in embedded software depth. These are real gaps and closing them conventionally would take a long time. But the connected appliance where the product that runs on software, learns over time, integrates into a home platform is a domain where India is two or three years behind the frontier, not twenty. That is a different race. The question is whether Indian hardware companies are building toward the next generation or trying to close the gap in the current one.
13. Talent pipeline
Indian hardware companies hire experienced design talent when they need a product. The result is a company dependent on whoever they can recruit rather than a company with a designed capability. Samsung grew designers who could generate the brief themselves, execute it, and eventually teach the next cohort. The talent pipeline and the product pipeline were, in the end, the same pipeline. Neither could advance faster than the other.
What I'm taking from Korea
This part is for me.
There's a Korean winter ritual called kimjang. It's the nationwide custom of making enough kimchi to last the entire season. Every household, rich or poor, stops to do it. I want to build something like this into how I work. One season a year of actual deep production, rather than the illusion of output that comes from always being busy and in motion.
I learned that when you pour a drink for someone in Korea, you use your right hand and hold your sleeve with your left, so both hands are visible. The two reasons: the billowy old sleeve could fall into the other person's drink, and the visible hands prove you're not holding a knife (from ancient times). I want to work like this. Make the process as visible as the product. Both hands visible, all the time.
Han: the grievance that cannot be properly avenged becomes fuel. I have a version of this. Most people building things seriously do. The question is whether you're aware of it and whether it's pointed at something specific, or whether it just burns diffusely.
Samsung named Sony. Then they stared at that name for twelve years.
I should probably write something on the wall.