A flea market on Jeju

I took KKUMUL and Berrapy to a flea market on Jeju Island and sold both brands across a table, which is the fastest and least flattering design feedback available.

Online, you get numbers. At a table you get faces. You watch which card somebody picks up, how long they hold it, whether they turn it over, and whether they put it back before reading the line inside. Nobody is being polite to you. Nobody is filling in a survey.

What the table told me

Two things I did not expect. The first is that people buy the hand-lettered cards for someone else and the character goods for themselves — the same person, at the same table, in two completely different frames of mind. I had been designing both as though they were the same purchase.

The second is that the pieces I was proudest of were not the pieces that moved. The ones that moved were the ones where the sentence was easiest to imagine saying out loud. That has changed how I write for KKUMUL more than any amount of looking at other brands did.

Running a stall is also an education in the unglamorous half of a business: pricing so the numbers survive a slow hour, packing so the paper goods arrive on an island uncreased, and being ready to explain a brand in one sentence forty times in a day. I would do it again next season.