A few decades ago a woman born into a wealthy South Korean family had one commanding duty: marry a man from a similarly wealthy family, raise children and dedicate her life to the domesticity of the new household. So, what happened to the woman who didn’t perform this chief duty in life? Well, ask Sung-Joo Kim, one of South Korea’s famous self-made woman entrepreneurs, who as the Chairman of Sungjoo Group and MCM Holdings AG, controls hundreds of luxury accessory retail outlets spread across more than 30 countries.
When Sung-joo wanted to setup her fashion retailing business three decades ago in South Korea, she not only had to take on the male-dominated South Korean society and the old boy’s network made up of billion-dollar chaebol owners, but also her family’s scepticism about her ambitions.
Only a few years ago Sung-joo had done things that were considered ‘unthinkable’ to her family. Sung-joo’s father, Soo-keon Kim, the founder and the chairman of Daesung Group, one of South Korea’s prominent chaebols or industrial conglomerates, wanted his daughter to be married into a wealthy family. Hardly interested in traditional arranged marriages, Sung-joo pleaded with her father to let her pursue higher studies. But even before her studies were completed, Sung-joo fell in love with a British-Canadian student in Harvard and married him. Furious at his daughter’s perceived transgression, the family patriarch disowned her and even formally took his daughter’s name out of the family registry. Writing for the Bloomberg Businesweekmagazine, the gritty Sung-joo Kim recalls “My parents wouldn’t talk to me. I had gone against their wishes, and there’s nothing worse in Confucian tradition.”