Hollys Coffee Brand Guidelines: A 1998 Gangnam Café, a Red Crown and KG Group

A Seoul espresso bar that kept growing.

Hollys began in Seoul in 1998. English Wikipedia says the first shop opened in May 1998 in Gangnam District; the company’s own history page gives June 1998, also in Gangnam. From its early days, the company says, it roasted its own beans to suit a Korean preference for a smooth, deep cup, and it has since added desserts and deli items so that people can visit at different times of day.

The chain grew quickly. English Wikipedia dates its 100th store to May 2006, at Gangnam station, and its 200th to May 2009, and says there were more than 100 Hollys Coffee shops in the country by 2008. It also looked abroad early: according to the same source, its first international store opened in Los Angeles in April 2008, followed by the Philippines in July 2011, Shenzhen in China in July 2012 and Bangkok in 2013, with franchise stores also listed in Vietnam and Malaysia. English Wikipedia dates the Hollys Coffee Academy to April 2011; the company describes it as a programme for coffee enthusiasts and people hoping to open a café of their own.

Ownership changed twice in seven years. The private-equity firm IMM Private Equity bought Hollys in 2013, the Korean daily Financial News reported in September 2020, when it said IMM had chosen KG Group, already the owner of KFC’s Korean business, as preferred bidder on 9 September 2020. English Wikipedia says the deal was done in October 2020: KG Inicis, a KG Group affiliate, acquired a 93.8 per cent stake in Hollys F&B through a special-purpose company called Crown F&B. The Asia Business Daily reported on 3 November 2020 that the operator had named a new chief executive from its brand-strategy division in the weeks after the sale.

A red crown without the word “Coffee.”

The new owner soon changed the name. On 15 March 2021, The Asia Business Daily reported, Hollys Coffee dropped the word “Coffee” from its logo and its brand name in order to present itself as a lifestyle brand; English Wikipedia confirms the March 2021 change, together with a revised logo and a new slogan. The new identity kept the existing crown-shaped emblem and set the English word HOLLYS beneath it.

The crown carries the story. In 2021 the company told the paper that it shows customers and employees, whom it calls “Hollystars,” holding hands; its current brand page describes it as a customer and a barista clasping hands, with Hollys between them. Colour is just as deliberate. The brand page names a Hollys Red, which the company says stands for passion, trust and a spirit of service. The legal operator named on the website today is KG F&B.

The menu runs well beyond espresso. The website groups drinks into coffee; lattes, chocolate and tea; Hollyccino blended drinks and bingsu shaved ice; smoothies and juices; and sparkling drinks, with food, packaged goods and merchandise alongside. In November 2020 The Asia Business Daily listed collaborations with Disney, Highbrow and Harry Potter among the brand’s merchandise releases.

Stores are planned around different uses. The company’s history page lists single seats, group seating and drive-throughs, chosen by location; in November 2020 the chain’s new chief executive told The Asia Business Daily that it had added single seats for people who study or work in cafés, known in Korea as kagongjok, along with café-style food and seasonal fruit drinks. Its about page points to hanok-style stores in Gyeongju and in Incheon’s Hanok Village, sea-view stores at Songjeong in Busan and Yeongnang beach in Sokcho, and pet-friendly stores in Jeju and beside the Gyeongui Line Forest Park in Seoul. The company also says that Q graders in its own lab choose its green beans and that it roasts them in its own plant.

Design and documentation.

South Korea’s café, bakery and quick-meal chains present themselves first through the street. Most are franchise networks, so a shopfront, a cup and a menu board have to look the same in thousands of places run by different owners. When the Korea Times reported in January 2025 that one coffee chain’s rebrand was on hold, the reason it gave was franchisees’ reluctance to pay for new store fittings: in a franchise system, a new look is also a shared bill.

Menus carry much of the identity. The chains in this group name their dishes and drinks rather than describing them in general terms, and abroad they lean on Korean flavours: dalgona lattes, sikhye, roasted sweet potato, injeolmi and black sesame cakes, misutgaru drinks and street snacks such as hotteok and bungeoppang, according to press reports on their stores in Malaysia, Laos and the United States. Cakes, toast, porridge, lunchboxes and burgers each give a chain its own signature.

Ownership is described plainly in the companies’ own pages and in the business press. Some chains belong to large food groups, some to private equity funds and some to individual owners; a single brand can pass through several of these in two decades. Store counts are published by the companies and repeated by the press with dates, and the numbers change quickly in a market the Korea Times described as split between premium and budget tiers.

Expansion abroad takes two main forms in these reports: a master franchise, in which a local partner runs the stores, or a subsidiary that runs them directly. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now, how its stores and menus present it at home and abroad, and which facts rest only on the company’s own word.

From Gangnam to Osaka.

Japan became the next stage. Hollys opened its Namba Marui store in Osaka on 1 May 2024 and a second Osaka store, in the Honmachi business district, in March 2025, The Asia Business Daily reported in May 2025. The company told the paper that the Japanese stores keep the bright interiors of its Korean shops, with large windows, several kinds of seating and a photo spot built around its bear mascot, Hollybear. Its Japan-only menu includes a Yakgwa Cream Latte, made with yakgwa, a traditional Korean honey pastry, which the company introduced when the Namba Marui store opened. The report named KG F&B as the operator of Hollys.

At home the store count is given by the company. Its history page says Hollys passed its 500th store in 2018 and, as of November 2026, operates about 570 stores; The Asia Business Daily reported in March 2021 that the company counted 587 stores at the end of 2020. Through the changes of owner, the crown and the red have stayed in place, while the word under them has become simply HOLLYS.

For a design guide, Hollys shows how a single emblem — a red crown — can carry a brand through a change of owner and a change of name. Compare Ediya Coffee, another Seoul coffee chain, and Paik’s Coffee, whose identity was redrawn in 2026. For this guide we use a crown red, espresso brown and a steamed-milk cream with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hollys Coffee’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.