• KpopKart is the first ever marketplace and community for K-pop fans worldwide to buy and sell K-pop merchandise
• The idea of KpopKart came about when CEO and Co-founder of KpopKart, Vera, experienced difficulty purchasing fan merchandise online

In this article, Vera Sun, CEO and Co-founder of KpopKart shares about her motivation to create the company and how her startup journey has been like thus far.

Founder’s Interview with Vera

What is KpopKart about?
KpopKart is the first ever marketplace and community for K-pop fans worldwide to buy and sell K-pop merchandise. Our merchandise are carefully curated and handcrafted by K-pop fans from all walks of life.

In the long term, we hope to be the go-to one stop shop for all fan-related transactions to take place online. We are also looking forward to being a fansite-based platform, where fandoms beyond K-pop can also use our website to conduct their community-based transactions and exchanges.We also want to be the host website for more communal activities — such as charity fundraisings by fan clubs, cafe meetups and fan-support meetings at concert venues.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m your typical Singaporean student who has gone through the rigours of our education system — junior college and now, university. I fell in love with K-pop during my secondary school years. Beyond that, I have always been an avid lover of the humanities. I enjoy immersing myself in the likes of poetry, stories, fine art and writing. I suppose that’s how I settled on majoring in Law in University, which is my main academic focus outside of KpopKart.

What motivated you to create KpopKart?
I chanced upon the idea of a K-pop marketplace one day in the shower after attending Taeyang’s (from Big Bang) White Night concert live. I thought it would be amazing if someone could start a marketplace for K-pop fans to make purchasing and selling products more convenient, since I had difficulty trying to buy Taeyang’s fan merchandise before the concert. However, this idea never really took fruition until I decided to join a business hackathon in school with my CFO, Janessa, who was my CCA mate then.

We pitched our idea to a group of entrepreneurs and received feedback from them. At that time, our university’s incubation manager had also noticed us and encouraged us to continue working on the idea. We were fascinated by the fact that our pitch was met with such positive reception, that it encouraged me and Janessa to soldier on with KpopKart and continue pushing for the marketplace to be made.

What was the process of building KpopKart like?
We went through many rounds of customer validation before we built our product. We initially started our own e-commerce website selling K-pop fashion to test the demand for K-pop related products. Through the website, we made over a thousand dollars in profit over 3 months while schooling — this led us to realising that there was actually a bustling market for K-pop merchandise out there, and thus we decided to pivot our idea into a K-pop marketplace!

After deciding on a marketplace, we went down to concert venues to conduct surveys on the buying and selling habits of K-pop fans, to further figure out what might be useful features to add on to our website. Online surveys were also sent out to to fans all around the world to get more feedback on our project.

Share about your Startup journey with us.
Being an early-stage startup, most of our growth started after joining The Start Pre-accelerator programme. The weekly check-ins with the mentors from The Start have been motivating for us to strive harder to achieve our goals and work towards our future plans. We get so many new ideas from their wonderful pool of mentors that it’s hard not to be incredibly grateful to be part of this programme!

In the following weeks, we hope to be able to release our MVP and get our first round of angel investment funding! I firmly believe in the ability of KpopKart to scale globally, and hope that it will be able to achieve the status of a global K-pop company catered towards realising the needs of our extremely niche and huge K-pop fanbase.

Where can we go to learn more about you and your company?
You can contact us via our social media pages (@kpopkart on Twitter and Instagram) or visit our website directly at kpopkart.co. We’re always happy to listen to feedback, new ideas and constructive criticism if any.