SEOUL – Early starts to workdays and late finishes are routine in South Korea, a country notorious for its hard-driving corporate culture, but Ms Erin Lim knew she wanted to do things differently at her business.<\/p>\n
The 38-year-old entrepreneur pioneered office-free work to help working mums like her in 2017 – well before work-from-home flexibility became a happy side effect of the pandemic, including for many parents.<\/p>\n
After the birth of her first son, Ms Lim, who describes herself as an “overwhelmingly picky customer”, could not find a baby carrier she liked.<\/p>\n
So, with her six-month-old son in tow, she headed to Seoul’s main fabric market.<\/p>\n
Soon, she had a prototype of the baby wrap she wanted and, despite having no manufacturing or entrepreneurial experience, launched a business making and selling the carriers out of her front room.<\/p>\n
“I’m a person who doesn’t take anything for granted. So, for example, when I started the company, I asked myself: Why would I need an office?”<\/p>\n
Now, Ms Lim’s company has 55 staff members – 92 per cent women, the majority working parents – and they all still work almost exclusively from home, offering flexible hours and keeping in-person meetings to the bare minimum.<\/p>\n
“The reason: I wanted to watch my children grow up,” said Ms Lim, adding that family life should take priority over a rigid, inflexible work schedule.<\/p>\n
The daily school drop-off “is a really essential time – to walk with them to school”, she said.<\/p>\n
So her company, Konny, enshrined the right to a school drop-off into its policies. “I didn’t want to have a company culture that didn’t understand that,” she added.<\/p>\n
At first, Ms Lim and her husband – the company’s second employee – stored their inventory in a spare room and did everything themselves.<\/p>\n
But as orders flooded in, she soon became overwhelmed by customer questions.<\/p>\n
She hired a customer service agent – a highly skilled executive who had previously left her decade-long job at a major South Korean gaming company over childcare issues.<\/p>\n
“There is a Korean phrase: the graveyard of many women’s careers is the winter holiday for their kid’s first year at elementary school,” said Ms Lim, referring to the first major school break, when many families run into childcare challenges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEOUL – Early starts to workdays and late finishes are routine in South Korea, a country notorious for its hard-driving corporate culture, but Ms Erin Lim knew she wanted to do things differently at her business. The 38-year-old entrepreneur pioneered office-free work to help working…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":32850,"menu_order":0,"template":"","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n